Inventors:
Dr Arunava Dhar – Chief Medical Officer, ResPNse Medical. Paediatric and Neonatal consultant, Neonatal Governance Lead, Mid and South Essex NHS foundation Trust. Multi award winner clinical entrepreneurship fellow, NHS England and Improvement
Ranadip Chatterjee – CEO, ResPNse Medical. Technology Specialist and Startup Mentor – Google for Startups
“Previously we only had ears. Now we have eyes as well.”
Dr Dhar is an expert in paediatric care, and found that he was regularly called to support colleagues in other hospitals who were treating a newborn baby with unexpected complications. Existing NHS systems rely on a central telephone-based helpline which is voice-only, typically leading to the baby being transferred to a centre of excellence which may be several hours travel away, losing valuable and often critical time in starting treatment. This also locks away the expert teams from those who really need them.
To address this problem, Dr Dhar teamed up with Mr Chatterjee to develop a medical grade video conference system called LocANTS that is specially designed for critical care. It is equipped with custom software and a high resolution remotely controllable video camera. The system is mobile so can be moved to the baby, can run for 6-7 hours on battery power, and allows the remote consultant to control the camera and observe details of the baby’s appearance and behaviour, as well as changes in their condition over time as treatment progresses.
The system has been piloted in a group of hospitals including Addenbrookes in Cambridge, Peterborough, Colchester and Ipswich, and has been shown to achieve its aim of enabling the remote expert to work together with the local medical team in real time to help the baby.
The team are now aiming to roll out the system more widely and investigate its applicability in other areas of urgent acute care such as strokes and trauma care.
The question for the i-Team is to identify and interview relevant experts to explore how such a system might be used and funded in a range of low resource settings. This can include extending the trial model of regional hospitals being supported by centres of excellence within the UK or other high income countries, as well as investigating its use more widely in low and middle income countries, to enable medical experts to impact a larger number of patients and help improve patient outcomes.