This thread will be added to and edited over time, aiming to build a helpful resource for clinicians newly starting with implementing the Digital Growth Charts.
Introduction
As a clinician you will already be very familiar with Growth Charts. The RCPCH Digital Growth Charts (which we abbreviate to ‘dGC’) are an evolution of the preceding paper/card charts - aiming to be accurate, safe and familiar. Just like the paper charts, it is critical that Digital Growth Charts are ubiquitous throughout UK healthcare, because it is only through ubiquity that we can create universal familiarity.
We can only train tomorrow’s clinicians if we have one Growth Chart interface and can rely on that interface being ubiquitously available in all care settings and throughout their careers.
Implementing dGC
The advent of digital technology has brought many benefits and success stories, but it has fragmented the UK healthcare software market, resulting in a variety of different systems in use across the country, which has made it far harder to publish a single growth chart standard and have it universally adopted.
In the past, the RCPCH was able to publish growth charts on card, and these could easily be bought by trusts and the ‘implementation’ was as simple as putting a small stack of the charts in each clinic room.
In the digital age, each hospital trust in the country is using a (very likely) unique combination of digital systems, it is several orders of magnitude harder to get growth charts in front of end users.
But it is not impossible, and we have designed the technical architecture of RCPCH Digital Growth Charts to make it as easy as possible for system suppliers to implement them.
As we work with more trusts and system suppliers, it is also more likely that we will have already implemented dGC within the system you use, and this of course means it’s possible that your implementation is in fact already done.
Key initial conversations
I am writing the following as though you are an interested paediatrician, motivated to get dGC implemented at your trust, but you are not necessarily experienced in, or in a role that has responsibility for, digital services. Please forgive me if any of the following is too basic.
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Discuss with other clinicians at your trust - for example, raise the need for dGC at a Paediatric departmental meeting - firstly this ensures that nobody else is already trying to get dGC implemented, and secondly it means you are approaching the next people in the process as a department, rather than as an individual.
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If you can find out who your trust’s Chief Clinical Information Officer is, then they or someone from their team is a good first port of call. Their remit is to liaise between the trust’s IT team and the trust’s clinicians, and as a courtesy they should at least be aware that you are contacting us regarding Digital Growth Charts. They might also be aware of pre-existing requests for dGC.
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Your trust’s Chief Information Officer will almost certainly need to know dGC are being implemented but depending on the system you use they might not need to have close involvement.
Key background reading/research
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In this forum we will build a database of systems which have already implemented dGC, so you can use the
search function to see if it has been done for the system you use. -
Read our Digital Growth Charts documentation/demo site which contains all documentation, clinical safety data, medical device registration, and more.
Other resources
- The Digital Health Networks is another forum site like this one, with a much wider remit covering all of digital health and care in the UK, the NHS, and wider. It is a good place to ask questions about implementation if you are having difficulty.