Technology is rapidly evolving and providing healthcare professionals with new ways to care for patients. Now, a new virtual technology could help save the lives of seriously ill newborn babies. It has recently helped its first patient, and its creators hope to implement it across the country.
LocANTS is a technology developed by a team at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH), which comprises Addenbrooke’s Hospital and its sister hospital the Rosie. It is a cloud-based platform that enables specialist neonatal consultants to connect to hospitals remotely so they can offer guidance regarding the care of newborns.
The consultants, who are part of the Paediatric and Neonatal Decision Support and Retrieval Service (PaNDR), can “parachute”’ into other hospitals by accessing the system from their laptops. They communicate with the hospital via a screen, camera, and microphone fitted to a workstation in the hospital’s neonatal unit. They can control the camera, zooming in as required so they can closely assess the baby.
The technology also allows the consultant to view and monitor vital information in real time. They can read the baby’s medical notes, examine scans and X-rays, and check the readings from ventilation machines and other equipment. Using this information, they can assist the medical team with decisions.
In short, the consultant is able to offer advice as if they were in the room. LocANTS allows clinicians from different locations to combine their expertise and decide on the best method of care for the baby.
The data is livestreamed to the PaNDR control room in Cambridge, where it is monitored. Should the data indicate that the baby’s health is worsening and requires further care, the team can act quickly and transfer the baby to a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). As all the relevant information for decision-making is collected in one place, the technology should take valuable time off neonatal transfer operations.
Babies born prematurely require specialist care. Having extra support during such a stressful time is invaluable, and LocANTS aims to provide this support to families without requiring them to leave their local hospital.
The first patient to benefit from the system was a baby girl who had a suspected meningitis and sepsis infection after being born prematurely at Colchester Hospital. Because of the technology, she could be treated by specialists from the PaNDR team at Colchester instead of being separated from her family and taken to the NICU in Cambridge. This offered significant relief to her parents.
Not all hospitals have the facilities to offer specialist neonatal care to newborn babies who are unwell. Babies will often have to be transported in incubators to an intensive care unit, which could be many miles away. By introducing LocANTS into hospitals, the developers hope that many more babies will remain closer to home, reducing stress for parents and families. And if fewer babies need to be transferred, more neonatal ambulance crews and critical care cots will become available.
The scheme is currently undergoing trials at hospitals in Ipswich, Colchester, and Peterborough. There are plans to implement it in all hospitals across eastern England before hopefully rolling it out nationwide.
There is a lot of faith that LocANTS could make a big difference in neonatal care. The project received funding from Health Tech Enterprise (HTE), an NHS innovation support team based in Cambridge. HTE awarded LocANTS with the Medtech Accelerator, which finances the early development of innovative medical technologies and digital health solutions that show the potential to enhance patients’ lives. The technology was also shortlisted for the Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Award in 2020.
Dr Sue Broster, a consultant in neonatal intensive care and neonatal transport medicine, is one of the medical experts behind LocANTS driving its development.
“It is in its infancy, but has the potential to become something very big,” Dr Broster said. She believes that LocANTS “has the potential to be truly remarkable and solve at a stroke a lot of risks, complications and pressures associated with neonatal transport.”
Any system that helps save the lives of newborns and improves their outcomes is certainly an exciting development for neonatal care. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of the technology’s success story.