Hello! I’m Jonny the new hire at Hippo Labs. I’m a doctor by background and have spent the past five years at Brighton and Sussex Medical School lecturing and completing a PhD. I’m based down in Brighton and have been at Hippo Labs since April this year. This summer we have been dotting our Is and crossing our Ts, to demonstrate that compliance and safety are built into the Hippo platform as standard. In this blog, I describe how we have baked in clinical safety at every step as well as how we demonstrate this.
Clinical Safety Standard DCB0129
I know that the Hippo Recaller Platform is safe for patients. As a doctor (and a former anaesthetist at that), clinical safety is at the heart of everything I do. This is how I was trained and my interests and instincts for this area are key to my role at Hippo Labs. If there is potential to harm patients, my hippo senses start tingling and we review/adjust what we’re doing to reduce this risk. From day one at Hippo Labs, I have felt free to question the platform at every stage to make sure that patients’ wants and needs are always put first and if necessary, take the platform offline.
Thankfully my enthusiasm for patient safety has been replicated elsewhere and even given a recognised national standard: DCB0129, Clinical Risk Management. By completing this standard, we as a company can easily demonstrate the potential risks to patients when companies use the Hippo Recaller Platform. In addition, the standard allows us to document what control measures we have put in place to ensure that risks to patients are minimal or at worst, justified. Thankfully the potential to cause harm with our platform is minimal; we do automated proactive care and we’re simply improving on existing manual processes rather than making complex clinical decisions or changing practice clinical processes. Still, we always consider the impact and potential risks to patients as we continue to grow and at every stage of development.
The DCB0129 standard is both descriptive and comprehensive when creating deliverables concerned with clinical safety. These include creating a Clinical Risk Management File (a place to store all your clinical safety documents), a Clinical Risk Management Plan, a Clinical Safety Case Report as well as performing a multidisciplinary Hazard Assessment workshop with an accompanying Hazard Log. Prior to completing this standard, I attended a digital clinical safety training course and am now Hippo Labs’ recognised Clinical Safety Officer. I will be keeping these documents up to date as the platform develops.
Many medical start-ups take clinical safety for granted or might have a more reactive approach to it. At Hippo Labs, we have included accessible Clinical Safety standards with the first major version of our platform. If you would like to know more about this process, please feel free to reach out to me Jonny@HippoLabs.co.uk - newly appointed CSO and Clinical Lead at Hippo Labs.
Previous title image ("Doctor Stethoscope On Laptop KeyPad") was courtesy of Jernej Furman licensed under CC BY 2.0
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