DiG

DiG is a digital service for healthcare professionals based on the diabetes inpatient guidelines developed by the Joint British Diabetes Societies. It supports healthcare professionals to make good decisions about how best to care for their patients by offering them a digital alternative to the current guidelines. The DiG platform addresses the problem of decision fatigue caused by inaccessible and confusing guidelines through a series of interventions within the current system. Our aim is to make current guidelines more accessible to junior doctors and non-specialists so that they are able to make good decisions under pressure and deliver better care to inpatients with diabetes. By diversifying and improving the way in which people are able to access the guidelines, the DiG platform ensures that everyone has immediate access to the most up-to-date information they need to make an informed decision about patient care.

Our solution is focused on supporting doctors and nurses to make good decisions under pressure so that they can deliver better care to patients with diabetes. Based on our research, our main challenge was to make the current guidelines as accessible to junior doctors and non-specialists as possible.

Current JBDS guidelines are not being adopted and deployed as well as they could be because they are difficult to understand and access. Busy healthcare professionals who are non-specialists or new to the profession find them unhelpful, especially in emergency situations and, as a result, patients are not receiving the care they need during hospital stays. The NHS requires a compliance culture to ensure consistent standards for care and treatment and healthcare professionals are expected to consider and deploy hundreds of different local and national guidelines, procedures and compliance assurance programmes. This overload of information is stressful and people are finding it increasingly difficult to navigate these myriad documents and systems. Coupled with the increasing complexity of the health issues that doctors and nurses are having to deal with, the inaccessibility of vital information is causing severe decision fatigue.

The DiG platform is a cloud based data repository for all core JBDS guideline data. It supports a core suite of 3 digital products - website, app and voice assistant. DiG has been designed to easily integrate into the current IT infrastructure of hospitals making it simple to deploy on existing technology to ensure that the guidelines are freely and easily accessible from any digital device. All the core data collected is tagged and categorised, so it can be deployed in a more responsive and intuitive way across a number of products and services. The guidelines are currently accessed and deployed in many different ways, from medical students doing in-depth research to junior doctors looking for information quickly in an emergency situation. The DiG is designed to make it easier for them to find what they need quickly and easily.