Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has launched a new digital pre-operative assessment process to reduce face-to-face contact.
As part of their plans to reduce patients attending the hospital, the process includes a digital health questionnaire for elective surgery for patients to complete at home.
The platform, Synopsis Home, has replaced three separate systems the trust previously used to coordinate pre-operative assessments and decision support.
The tool will be used to support 1,000 pre-operative assessments each month. The trust will send a link to the patient to complete a questionnaire, with the results then sent to the trust’s pre-operative assessment department where staff can triage and swim lane patients into the correct categories.
Rachel Foley, Senior Sister Pre-Operative Assessment Countywide, Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said “We had found ourselves spending an increasing amount of time assessing patients that were fit for surgery and so did not actually require an hour appointment for a pre-operative assessment in hospital, whereas some patients needed longer than an hour with a member of the team.”
“To help identify these fit and healthy patients and drive down unnecessary POA attendances, we worked alongside Intouch with Health to launch Synopsis Home.”
“Earlier POA interventions are allowing us to identify patients at high risk of being unfit for their operation and intervene sooner and with more effective medical input to ensure they stand the very best chance of their surgery going ahead.”
Michael Applewhaite, Regional Sales Director, Intouch with Health, added “The trust was previously using three separate systems to manage the POA pathway, which was unwieldy for staff to access and created integration issues.”
“A key problem was that, while the previous software captured most of the POA, it couldn’t capture activities or additional information. This meant this information was added in a separate piece of software which was not audited and had no version history.”
