the Hospital
Established in 1840, King's College Hospital is an acute care facility in Denmark Hill, Camberwell, in the London Borough of Lambeth. They provide local hospital services for over 1 million residents in the boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham, and Bromley. With over 15000+ staff, King's College Hospital is considered one of London's largest and busiest teaching hospitals. Their vision is to provide outstanding patient care, be leaders in research, innovation, and education, and have diversity, equality, and inclusion at the heart of everything they do.
They offer extensive specialist services and are internationally recognised for treatment and care in liver disease, transplantation, neurosciences, haemato-oncology, and foetal medicine. King's is also globally recognised as a world-leading innovation centre. From conducting the UK's first bone marrow transplant to completing over 6,000 liver transplants, the hospital has been at the forefront of new and quality healthcare.
For this project, MEG worked with the Quality Assurance team at King’s College Hospital to build a quality auditing tool that healthcare staff could use on a day-to-day basis.
The CHALLENGE
King's College Hospital previously used a different software solution to perform quality audits. However, that system didn't quite have all the functionalities that they needed on a day-to-day basis. For example, because the software provider handled most of the administrative tasks, they couldn't make any modifications to the system independently.
Another key challenge was the reporting feature. The previous system was difficult-to-use and offered little flexibility, which meant that management couldn't extract the data and reports they needed to monitor audit compliance.
In February 2022, as they approached the end of their contract with the software provider, they decided to explore the market and see what other quality auditing tools were available.
“From the offset, we knew that MEG was the right system for us. It just stood out from the others in terms of ease and use, both for front-end users and administrators. We were sold on it pretty quickly!”
the Solution
Since King’s College Hospital would soon lose access to the previous solution, time was of the essence. Over the course of three to four months, the MEG team implemented its Quality Auditing tool within the organisation and rolled it out to 2100+ staff members.
The objective behind the project was to build a minimalistic quality auditing tool that staff can easily use to record compliance. To do this, a library of eight audits was created, with each audit heavily customised to maximise the amount of information obtained from it.
Rather than including simple 'yes' or 'no' queries, the questions were framed and frequently tailored by the quality assurance team at King's College Hospital to gain deeper insights into the organisation's quality data. The resulting data and dashboards were then analysed during monthly quality meetings to provide guidance to ward teams on how they can make adjustments to enhance the quality of the data received. This process remains central to the hospital's quality assurance framework.
“The auditing application the staff use is very intuitive, has a clean interface, and is really easy to use. Most users didn’t require formal training sessions because the app gives you clear instructions when you first log in. It made it very easy for us.”
Hospital staff can complete audits while on the go, attach photos and other relevant information to audit records, and be involved in continuous quality improvement within the organisation, all through MEG's intuitive and user-friendly quality auditing tool.
They also use the Bookmark Filters functionality to create and save personalised views of the data by combining specific filter criteria such as teams, locations, or other attributes, eliminating the need to recreate filters each time they access the system. This, in turn, saves them time and effort.
Since reporting was one of the primary shortcomings of the previous system, the MEG team set up custom reports that administrators and hospital management can use to analyse and track trends and performance of quality data over time.
Below are sample images of MEG’s Quality Auditing Tool - similar to the one used by staff at King’s College Hospital.
(Please note that all data displayed in the images below is taken from a MEG demo account and does not correlate to King’s College Hospital in any way.)
THE RESULT
Soon after implementing MEG within King's College Hospital, the accessibility and visibility of quality data significantly improved. Management could now compare data across different wards, areas, and specialties, something that was not possible with the previous system.
While the quality of compliance data obtained depends on the users' inputs, MEG helped set clearer expectations and reveal areas for improvement, resulting in increased thoroughness among staff.
The ability to compare audits between teams using the reporting dashboard provides administrators and senior management valuable insights for quality assurance. This has been instrumental in bridging the gap between the data validation and control processes.
“As the lead for quality assurance, I find the reporting module incredibly helpful. I use it to analyse and measure data in different ways, and it is fundamental to our quality assurance process. MEG has been a big hit at King’s!”
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