In a landmark technical go live Mid and South Essex Health and Care Partnership create a single waiting list across the ICS as a foundation for reducing the backlogs
Reading & Basildon, UK – 12 May 2022: Insource Ltd, the leading elective care solutions and data management provider to the NHS, are delighted to be working with Mid and South Essex Health and Care Partnership (ICS) on their full elective recovery programme.
In the first step, the Insource data management platform has delivered a single system-wide Patient Tracking List (PTL). This single, fully linked PTL provides true end-to-end RTT(Referral to Treatment) waiting lists across three acute sites and is aggregated to ICS level.
The unified PTL covers all specialties, on all acute sites, all the way from referral, through outpatients and diagnostics, to treatment or discharge. It will automatically be refreshed daily and become the single source of information across the ICS for patient pathway planning. This landmark technical go live is an achievement no other solution has yet accomplished
The system-wide data flow was achieved within two weeks. The remaining nine were spent on rigorous checking of individual pathways to ensure data accuracy and completeness, to uncover broken pathways, and validate or update the configuration against local rules. Although an automated ICS-wide near-real-time PTL is new to the NHS, Insource see this as all in a day’s work and have been unifying complex operational data for over a decade in the acute, mental health and community sectors.
Strategic partnership gives ICS real opportunity to prioritise patients
Barry Frostick, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Board, stated, “At Mid and South Essex (MSE) we were particularly hard hit by a couple of Covid waves resulting in significant elective care backlogs, with some specialties waiting much longer than we would want. We see our strategic partnership with Insource on the elective recovery programme as a real opportunity to prioritise patients according to clinical need and length of wait, to standardise clinical processes across our multiple sites and to maximise our system-wide waiting list capacity. Having a single, robust, fully validated PTL for all clinicians to refer to is a massive first step.”
The full project aims to reduce waiting list backlogs and long waits, ensure fair patient scheduling and activity booking, and maximise cross-site bed and theatre capacity based on the resources available – to meet the extraordinary demand the system is facing.
The elective care programme is underpinned by the Insource elective recovery suite. It includes system-wide waiting list management and statutory reporting, agile capacity and bed occupancy planning, clinic and theatre scheduling and patient journey analytics to streamline care pathways and improve processes throughout the ICS.
Becoming a data-driven organisation
Naresh Chenani, Director of Planning and Performance, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, added, “It is my role to ensure we are effectively planning our capacity across our estate to reduce our backlogs. We need to improve performance across all specialties, but especially in Orthopaedics and Ophthalmology where we have the biggest waiting lists.
“In line with the NHS ‘Data Saves Lives’ policy, one of our strategic objectives is to become a data driven organisation. We are now in the enviable position of having all the data in one place – a single source of the truth – for informed decision-making across the ICS. We have a consolidated view of the waiting list position, so we can ensure patients are treated against clinical priority and date order. And, our clinicians and operational staff will shortly have visibility of the unified PTL so we can see how best to allocate staff, theatre and bed resources to boost productivity and drive waiting times down.”
It can be very powerful for clinicians to see what’s going on and why some patients are being prioritised over others. The Insource tool will be critical in helping Mid and South Essex do this. The data is now flowing, and the next stage is to involve both clinicians and operational staff so they can see first-hand how they can benefit. Operational go live is planned for early May.
Platformed on resilient, system-wide architecture
The whole programme is platformed on a resilient, system-wide architecture which utilises the latest modelling technology, Nutanix HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure), across two of the three acutes. The Hybrid Cloud strategy ensures seamless disaster recovery across the geographically separate locations, with all the back-ups on-premise but also on Azure cloud. So even if all acutes were lost the service could be stood up again very quickly.
Important flagship site nationally for NHS
Sam Elliott, CEO Insource, stated: “Mid and South Essex are a very important flagship site, not only for Insource but nationally, and the work they’re doing is ground-breaking in many respects. Building a single, fully validated, automated PTL across an ICS may be our bread and butter, but it is also providing the data foundation for a wide range of planning, performance, clinical and process improvement initiatives that could revolutionise care delivery going forward.
We are immensely proud to be helping MSE chart the future and deliver true joined-up care and efficient use of resources system-wide to bring down the backlogs.”
Foe more information see our elective care solutions suite
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