A health tech platform which provides early warning signs to clinicians – helping them quickly identify the sickest patients in hospital – has been rebranded following a takeover last year.

Patientrack, which has been used widely in NHS hospitals in England and Scotland – including to great effect at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife, where it reduced cardiac arrests by as much as two thirds – will now be known as Alcidion.

The company, which is known for providing technology for electronic patient observations and early warnings of patient deterioration to the NHS, first announced it had been acquired by Alcidion Group Limited in 2018. Alcidion Group is an Australian health informatics organisation founded in Adelaide and serves 215 hospitals across the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

The company’s product – also called Patientrack – will still be available to NHS hospitals, which have recorded significant gains in patient safety by using the technology – including reductions in cardiac arrests, mortality, lengths of stay, and admissions to intensive care. Hospitals have also innovated with the Patientrack technology to tackle deadly conditions, including acute kidney injury and sepsis.

The way it works is that the company’s software provides early warning indicators to doctors via an app on a handheld device, such as an iPad or a Windows-based system. The software also has a facility to ‘escalate’ warnings, ensuring that clinical staff are notified of vital signs information. Clinical staff gather together in what has been termed ‘safety huddles’ using the system’s data to make crucial patient decisions.

Whilst the Patientrack product will remain fully supported with the same dedicated UK team, the company has now been formally rebranded as Alcidion, to reflect its wider offering of cutting edge technology to the NHS, designed to transform healthcare.

Donald Kennedy, UK general manger, Alcidion, said: “We are building on a remarkable legacy of collaboration with the NHS that has delivered a big impact on patient safety.

“As Alcidion, we have the ability to take this to the next level, and to offer the NHS a much wider set of digital tools. These have been designed to not only support the next generation of patient safety, but to streamline patient journeys, increase operational efficiency, inform clinical decision making and help hospitals to understand their data.

“We are already doing all of this with early NHS pioneers, and so it is only fitting that we adopt our new identity that reflects our even more compelling offer to the NHS.”

Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust became the first UK organisation to procure the full Alcidion product suite in a five-year partnership announced earlier in 2019. The trust is deploying a health technology platform that will transform patient safety and clinical efficiency for its hospitals and its local healthcare system partners and will help the trust realise its mission to become a self-made digital exemplar.

Alcidion provides solutions spanning predictive analytics, patient flow, clinical messaging, integration support, and clinical decision making. The Patientrack product will continue to perform its electronic observations, patient assessments and early warning role, as part of an integrated offering with other Alcidion products. This includes the Miya platform, which provides decision intelligence software that consolidates real-time data from disparate healthcare IT systems and pushes decision intelligence and guidance to users via mobile devices.

The Miya platform is cloud-based with analytics tools to help professionals manage clinical workflows and reduce avoidable injury. It provides logistics tools to give valuable time back to the care team.

Smartpage, the company’s clinical messaging system is used in hospitals to improve communication and safety in the clinical environment.

Kate Quirke, managing director of Alcidion, said: “This is about transforming healthcare together, by empowering doctors and nurses to deliver the best possible outcomes for their patients. We are already working with the NHS to use technology in a way that delivers insights to clinicians so they can prevent and intervene.

“Healthcare professionals need to understand how their patients are progressing and need to have information about their current status and potential risk. Alcidion has rapidly developed in the last 12 months in meeting these challenges, with acquisitions allowing us to grow into a leading informatics company helping healthcare providers throughout the world.

“People in the NHS have come to know Patientrack as an important innovator in the patient safety arena, and we now look forward to developing that innovation to a growing number of areas, as we continue to partner with one of the most respected health institutions in the world to deliver the best for its patients.”