Providing full data-led cancer pathway management
The Insource Cancer Tracking solution is revolutionising ways of working within and across teams in cancer services. It will shortly be operational throughout NHS Highland, which covers the largest healthcare geography in the UK. PP+ Cancer provides full cancer pathway management including patient event tracking, breach analysis, local operational reporting for service improvement and full Scottish Cancer Waiting Time Standards reporting.
Full visualisation of cancer pathways – single source of truth
Working in partnership, NHS Highland and Insource, have jointly focused the PP+ Cancer Tracking solution to match NHS Scotland Cancer Waiting Time Standards and deliver digital operational management that enables ‘evidenced’ service improvement. With our extensive Reports Catalogue, the solution can be quickly adapted to English national reporting standards.
Innovative visualisation of cancer pathways including – cancer types, key milestones, last known events, planned next events, important reportable dates, first treatment types, locations, and immediate visibility of delays – are consolidated into a single source of the truth. This enables pro-active tracking and management of referrals through to first treatment and will pinpoint any issues that require immediate attention. The solution highlights potential bottlenecks in the use of resources, for example, or delays between pathway events – which are critical for performance planning and clarification of improvement initiatives
Retrospective reporting turns into pro-active service-led platform
The collaboration, and resulting solution, turns what has historically been a retrospective, centralised reporting process into a pro-active, service-led platform that helps up to 450 operational and clinical staff across the geography to work more efficiently. It reduces duplication of effort and ensures accurate and complete information is available to progress patient care and deliver improved outcomes.
Bringing real-time data to frontline staff
Cancer has a high priority given the increasing incidence of the condition emerging post-Covid. The NHS Highland cancer services team aim to minimise the stress and anxiety for patients. This joint strategic solution brings real-time care and process data to frontline staff and ultimately to consultants. It gives a visible portrayal for the management of all patients through their cancer journey and their statutory milestones. It will cover all cancer types and moves the central services team from simply doing waiting times reporting to offering a full operational tool to remote cancer teams across Highland, Argyll and Bute. The solution will also help save hundreds of hours in manual statutory and ad hoc reporting.
PP+ Cancer Tracking solution
The PP+ Cancer Tracking solution puts the patient at the heart of cancer care process. The system gives visibility of all tracking tasks undertaken on all patients in real-time, using structured data capture, and allows for pro-active alerts to be put in place to pinpoint where focused action is needed. This enables timely interventions in the tracking and management of patients through their cancer pathways. In particular, supporting automated escalations when key events have not been completed within a specific timeframe. Critically, the solution gives cancer services teams the ability to see the current status of every patient and the planned next steps. Interventions then become immediate where the next step is not clearly understood, and instantly streamlines patient care.
From ad-hoc reporting to clinically driven services
With Covid, NHS Scotland is very data hungry and is requesting numerous ad hoc reports. With the previous, largely manual system these ad hoc reports were taking hundreds of hours to compile. The PP+ Cancer Tracking solution can, via the foundational data warehouse, automatically access data in the core systems such as the TrakCare EPR for referrals, vetting status and appointments. In addition to acting as a portal to other sources of data such as Radiology.
The system creates multiple views that helps users track patients through their care.
- The Patient View shows all the details of a single patient, the events that have taken place and the planned next steps, if known.
- The Pathways View dynamically generates lists of patients using simple search functions and presents a near real time view of the latest information at any given point in time.
- The Activity Timeline View illustrates graphically the sequence of events and the duration between key events. This highlights potential delays so the admin and service teams can address any process issues immediately. Breach analyses at task level becomes much simpler and is less time consuming with information readily accessible.
Weekly and monthly reports are automatically generated as a by-product of good management and system use, removing the need to manually generate submission files from various manually created reports. Time can be re-focussed from laborious data extraction and collection to more beneficial analyses and pro-active task tracking.
A major shift for cancer services
PP+ Cancer is a major shift for cancer services from a retrospective reporting mechanism to a clinically driven services enablement tool and is providing an opportunity for NHS Scotland to lead the UK in cancer service delivery.
Patient Pathway Plus – a complete waiting list management solution
Our core Patient Pathway Plus (PP+) is a powerful waiting list management solution that helps boost elective recovery. PP+ delivers validated data and patient tracking lists for RTT, Non-RTT and cancer patients daily, enabling healthcare organisations to confidently manage all their elective care pathways in a single solution. PP+ manages elective patient pathways
in near real-time. It automatically links and checks all pathways against all applicable rules and creates and manages workflows for the teams who administer them.
Download our PP+ data sheet here
