It may not be immediately clear why a local IT software company could clinch a major deal because hospitals in the UK are trying to save money... Even when you find out that one of the ways hospitals are doing this is by installing double glazing.

6PM’s new research and development unit director, David Vassallo, was faced with an interesting dilemma facing hospitals which were installing the energy-efficient panes: pagers are linked to transmitters which are installed outside the hospital premises, to reduce radiation. But the signal does not get through the lead in the lining of the double glazing, making the thousands of pagers used throughout NHS hospitals hopelessly inefficient.

The most obvious thing might be for hospitals to dump their pagers and replace them with smartphones. But this is hardly the right solution for an exercise which started with hospitals trying to save money.

He and his intern, an engineering student, put their heads together to find a way to use existing pagers – meaning they could be phased out over their lifetime.

“We tried to find a way around it and realised that most hospitals now have a Wi-Fi network. We came up with a server which links pagers to the Wi-Fi, which is actually PC-based so it is easier to send messages from than the pager unit.

“And it has the benefit of being able to send messages to both pagers and smartphones – so it is future-proof. It is also ‘smart’ enough to recognise whether the recipient has a pager or smartphone, and therefore whether it needs to send a 32-character pager message or a longer version for smartphones,” Vassallo said.

The server can also set up multidisciplinary teams – say a crash team for the emergency department – to alert all members simultaneously.

“It took us six months but we have now designed the system and shown that it works. A representative from one of the leading paging companies is coming to Malta to see it for himself as it could be the ideal solution for 17 hospitals in the UK... so far,” he said.

All we need is a hospital interested in trying it out on a pilot project basis

This is only one of the projects that Mr Vassallo is working on, with the full backing of 6PM’s chief technical officer Brian Zarb Adami.

“Since it was launched, 6PM has moved ever more steadily into the healthcare field, focusing on logistics, clinical data and information,” Mr Zarb Adami said.

Mr Vassallo’s unit was set up just 18 months ago, and has already worked on two other projects, which are proactive rather than driven by the end-user.

“We visit hospitals and discuss their problems and then try to come up with solutions,” he said.

Another product is Ceptr, a tablet-based app which displays a patient’s medical information, rather than the doctor having to ‘pull’ the information – and he or she would also be able to configure it to show the most relevant information for that particular patient.

“We also realised that diagnostic machines like MRI scanners and ECGs have internet ports so rather than having the results printed out, scanned and then inputted elsewhere, why not have them connected directly to the central system?

It took us eight months to do as there are so many different types of machine and so many different types of record. But now we know it can be done. All we need is a hospital interested in trying it out on a pilot project basis so that we can hand it over to a development team,” Mr Zarb Adami said.

“There is a strong business case for this app as very often a patient is not discharged until all their test results are in. Given that a bed costs £400 a days – and one in intensive care costs £1,000 a day – you immediately realise the business case for being able to discharge a patient as soon as possible, rather than having to wait needlessly for test results.

“Not to mention the relief of a patient being discharged as soon as possible and the importance of freeing up the bed for another patient!”

6PM is also working on ways to put its solution into the cloud so that end-users do not have to face the full capital expenditure needed for development but can “buy in” what it requires from existing solutions.

“David is now also working on ways to incorporate i-beacons, which send out an identification signal via Bluetooth.

“This can be used to register the people who come near a patient, sending out an alert when, for example, the nurse meant to deliver medication does not turn up.

“But it can be used for everything from time and motion studies to links with Ceptr,” Mr Vassallo explained.