P53: Office 365: Microsoft Lists as a tool for a secure online second-line/systemic drug database

Louise McKenna and Grant Wylie

Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Glasgow, UK

Pre-COVID our dermatology department had slightly fragmented and unreliable methods of storing the details of patients receiving second-line and systemic medications, such as immunosuppressive agents. Often, this information was held within individual Microsoft Excel worksheets on desktop PCs. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, rapid access to this information was required to allow high-risk patients and shielding groups to be identified. We spent significant time updating and merging these separate files to form a single document. At that stage, multiuser updates and simultaneous working on a single document was not feasible, and there was often duplication and being ‘locked out’. A multirow section of our newly combined document was also inadvertently deleted and could not be recovered. Thankfully, at an early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft 365 was rapidly adopted and rolled out in our health board. The aim was to provide a comprehensive, all-in-one digital workspace, including communications, cloud storage, backup and syncing, and productivity apps to aid working remotely and from home. Our department, in a tertiary teaching hospital, migrated to this software and it rapidly helped facilitate increased digital collaboration between clinical team members. It was recognized that its cloud storage capability would be a useful tool to help centralize and store an online, amendable patient database to record details of current and previous second-line treatments, and important information relating to shielding and COVID-19 risk status. One of the revamped application functions within Office 365 is Microsoft Lists. This offers real-time, online, secure functionality, with the ability to colour-code patients by drug, consultant and COVID-19 risk status. All members of our team have access, including administrative and clinical pharmacy staff, allowing each patient record to be easily accessed and updated. There is an additional functionality to allow email notifications of any updates (e.g. when made to specific patient entries) and even direct notification to associated stakeholders (such as government COVID-19 risk and shielding bodies). This set-up has also provided an ideal platform to allow research and clinical audit activities to be performed, which can be backwards formatted into Microsoft Excel, again for any data interpretation. Removed entries for patients no longer on second-line drugs can be automatically transferred to a linked archive list. In summary, this digital project highlights our departmental experience in using Microsoft Lists as an online, secure, cloud-based portal for patients on second-line medications and to record accurately COVID-19 risk status. It is easy to use, pleasing on the eye and its functionality could be transferrable to other clinical areas, such as in skin cancer or diagnosis logs.