Last week we explained why new NHS capital funding is expected soon, and promised we would show how a coherent plan for investing it can build into a virtuous cycle of productivity gains.
This week, we will start by looking at elective pathways. Partly because the successful restoration of 18 week waits so obviously depends on them, and also because there is so much opportunity to improve productivity there.
We are not proposing anything futuristic. AIs and robots are not going to ride to the rescue (although both will play their parts in the years to come). We simply propose that the things you do already could be joined up a lot better.
You probably already:
- send text messages to cohorts of patients, to validate them on the waiting list;
- identify low-complexity patients who could be transferred to a surgical hub or independent sector provider; and
- track follow-up outpatients and active monitoring patients to avoid delays and risk in their care.
But it’s probably hard and time consuming work, with a lot of spreadsheets and other semi-manual processes. Information from one activity may not flow through to the next, making it hard for staff to manage pathways effectively, and causing patients to keep repeating themselves.
What if all the required data for all the relevant systems was always available in one place? What if that data could both trigger and inform all of those pathway actions? What if the results of every action dropped back into the data, ready to enhance the steps to come?
In short, what if data became the backbone for joining up all these steps and steadily automating them into coherent and fail-safe processes? Clinicians and managers would not have to spend ages searching for data in different IT systems and piecing the bits together. Instead they would have a full picture of what every patient needs next, and could devote their efforts to solving capacity bottlenecks and improving pathways.
We hope you can see a virtuous cycle forming. We started with an incremental improvement in joined-up processes, which released staff time and resources to further improve patient pathways, building up a pattern of success that the next capital investment can build on.
In our next and final post in this short series, we will look under the bonnet, to show how it all works at reasonable cost and using familiar technology. But if you would like to start exploring the possibilities now, then simply get in touch and we can start talking right away.
