Elective Care Hubs aim to pool resources to deliver increased elective activity, within a health system or geography, to augment the utilisation of resources and the ability to treat patients in date or priority order.

Elective Care Hubs are being hailed as the first step in reducing the huge waiting list backlogs, with each region or Trust looking at the best way to establish them across their geography. London, for example, is looking to fast track the creation of centralised surgical hubs within each of its five ICS health systems to cover the high-volume specialties – orthopaedics, ophthalmology, urology, gynaecology, ENT and general surgery. Whereas regional trusts are looking to combine existing resources for high throughput centres that optimise clinical staff, bed capacity, use of diagnostic equipment and theatre space, to maximise patient flow.

Collaborative approach to shared care crucial

Managing and coordinating elective activity with other trusts will necessitate a collaborative approach, and system-wide, integrated processes. The need to schedule patients into the hub, book resources, carry out treatments and ensure follow up care without adversely effecting existing care pathways throughout the rest of the trust is critical. One northern trust outlined the need for an IT infrastructure that enabled – a visibility of true capacity, an accurate understanding of waiting lists, patient prioritisation at system level, against wait times and clinical priority, detailed collaboration between trusts, and a data and analytics capability that understands the demand for each speciality. Plus, the clinical leadership to ensure standardisation and prioritisation across the region.

Core need for accurate, up-to-date, accessible data

What is absolutely clear is that each location will have its own specific challenges, but the underlying need is for accurate, up-to-date and accessible data on which to make both strategic and operational decisions in a continually evolving landscape. Manual, out of date spreadsheets are no longer fit for purpose.

Core to any responsive demand and capacity planning and elective backlog reduction is an accurate, consolidated data foundation on which to base pivotal decisions. Working together Insource and Gooroo, form an integrated solution, that provides advanced forecasting and capacity planning across NHS hospitals and regional systems. Plus, Patient Pathway Plus (PP+), from Insource, gives hospitals and regional systems a unified, accurate view of their waiting list backlog across all elective care, not just RTT, but also across all specialities, showing the full scale of the problem. By incorporating clinical priorities, it allows Boards to plan and redeploy services against greatest need.

Patient Pathway Plus Enterprise, for system-wide collaboration

Patient Pathway Plus (PP+) Enterprise Edition is designed specifically to provide daily waiting list data at Trust level and a combined Regional waiting list for centralised reporting, identification of clinical priorities and care deadline breaches, and to provide Board-level or region-level oversight of the size of the electives task for key activity planning. PP+ Enterprise encompasses a single waiting list containing all the patients across all the Trusts within the designated region and enables both Trust-level and combined Regional reporting, saving the individual Trusts huge amounts of time and manpower costs.

Data consolidation across Trust boundaries

Patient Pathway Plus is a proven solution, already operational in numerous Trusts throughout the NHS. PP+ Enterprise extends proven Trust-level success across a region (or group of Trusts) to provide a common data consolidation, evidence-based validation, and reporting platform for the collaborating Trusts supporting the elective care hub.

Increasingly there is a need across the NHS to combine scarce resources and to consolidate the manpower and reporting efforts across traditional Trust boundaries. This is critical for the emerging Elective Care Hubs and will be especially key when full ICS and STP pathway management and reporting become a major priority. Insource is exceptionally well placed to address these combined data consolidation and reporting challenges both now and across care boundaries in the immediate future.

Proven Solution, Quickly Deployable

As a proven product, PP+ is quickly and immediately deployable with no need for any custom software creation or heavy time involvement from busy IT departments. The solution at the local and regional level is totally automated,  updated daily with active data provenance for increased data confidence.

PP+ is designed to respect individual Trust local business rules and nuances regarding waiting list management, DNAs and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). It also comes with full analytics and cohort segmentation with data drill-through enabled by its sophisticated data management capability and Unified Data Layer.

PP+ Enterprise is vendor neutral and works with any combination of PAS, EPR’s, clinical and administration systems.

PP+ and PP+ Enterprise are modules within the Health Data Enterprise platform and are fully expandable for capacity planning, demand management, cancer pathways, statutory returns, analytics modules and more.