Alder Hey Innovation, in collaboration with Alder Hey Heart Centre, have developed a clinically validated paediatric remote patient monitoring platform called Little Hearts At Home®™ (LHAH).  

LHAH transforms existing post-operative pathways of fragile infants from a reactive approach to a proactive and preventative model, by integrating automatic alerts into domains of child health and well-being at home, specific to the heart condition. The platform aims to facilitate a safe early discharge, to reduce emergency admissions, and reduce unnecessary readmissions. 

The LHAH platform hosts the information of babies born with severe heart defects, such as single ventricle anatomy, providing remote patient monitoring, connecting patients, parents, community care providers, and hospital staff. Real-time data provided by the platform is audited, and counter-checked with hospital visit records of these children over a 12 month period. Contemporary data is compared with historic cohorts from a matched period in previous years before the platform is implemented. All patients are managed by a tertiary regional hospital (Alder Hey Heart Centre).

There are 63 patients (Alder Hey’s most vulnerable Cardiac patients) utilising the system and the platform has been rolled out throughout the CHD Network which covers North West England, North Wales and Isle of Man, more than 300 community nurses.

Benefits include:

• An improved proactive and preventative model of care for patients.
• A collaborative tool between specialist clinical teams and community teams.
• Parent assurance – knowing they are carefully monitored after discharged.
• Patient experience – better patient centred care between teams.
• Clinical assurance – being able to monitor the patient in the community.
• Empowering community nursing teams – the teams depend on them to be eyes in the community, they can manually trigger alerts as well as us having the automatic alerts if the patient breaches their unique thresholds.
• Reduction in emergency ambulatory admissions.
• Reduction in outpatient appointments.
• Alder Hey have been able to use the data as evidence for business case towards additional resource, (a cardiac dietitian).
• The analytical data dashboard is used for strategic clinical decision making, regarding triaging, prioritising poorly patients who may need their surgeries accelerating.
• Reductions in calls from the community teams to phone line used by other professionals and families.
• Cost savings.

Alder Hey won a Knowledge Asset Grant fund in the summer to expand and is about to kick off the next stage of developments:

• Expand to other specialities (such as Alder Hey long term ventilation) patients.
• Expansion to children outside Alder Hey, other organisations and health care providers (currently scoping).

The Heart Care team at Alder Hey were also National Award Winners – RCN- Innovation in your Speciality Award for LHAH.