Guy’s and St Thomas’ relied on a range of spreadsheets and Windows-based files to meet the stringent requirements of the Civil Contingencies Act but found that this method was unwieldy and not transparent enough.

Justin Cucklow, Senior Emergency Planning Officer at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust explains "During an incident response, we didn’t have good visibility into which parts of the business are affected and how we’re prioritizing our resources to maintain patient care."

Guy’s and St Thomas’ wanted a database solution that would bring together three core elements: the ability to leverage the enterprise-wide license they already had with K2, support from an in-house development team and integration with Everbridge.

With K2 and Everbridge, Guy’s and St Thomas’ felt that “there was a real opportunity to link together two systems, both of which are highly resilient, to transform the way that we deliver business continuity management.” Working with their K2 partner Velocity IT, Guy’s and St Thomas’ linked the power of K2’s SmartForms with the power of Everbridge’s ER notifications system to create U.K.’s first end-to-end acute healthcare business continuity management system.

Drills and training exercises have proved what Guy’s and St Thomas’ had hoped, their K2/Everbridge system would facilitate: whether it’s two ‘o’clock in the morning and a Band 6 nurse is responding to a catastrophic or major impact event, or it’s nine ‘o’clock in the morning and an executive director is responding to the same alert, there is a consistent response.

Plus, clinicians can spend more time delivering care instead of developing emergency response strategies from scratch.

Building this solution with K2 and Everbridge saved Guy’s and St Thomas’ incalculable resources and frustration.

“If we had to use normal code tools, we would have stumbled at the first hurdle,” Justin Cucklow explains.

“If we were to have fiddled around with Windows Workflow, this would have been very difficult.”