Sussex ICS has launched a new digital discharge planner to provide multidisciplinary teams with “immediate access to health information” regarding patients leaving hospital, offering a single source of truth and enabling all providers and organisations involved in a patient’s care to input updates to their care record.
The Transfer of Care dashboard will sit within Sussex’s existing Plexus Shared Care Record, providing access across teams and also capturing patient wishes and preferences relating to palliative care, dietary information, and more. Whilst the new planner is based on the patient vision system from NHS North East and North Cumbria, it has been “developed and tailored to needs in Sussex”.
With studies suggesting that the current discharge confirmation process can take “up to 19 hours”, the ICS shares hopes that the dashboard can help to speed up this process and “reduce the risk of patients waiting around in hospital unnecessarily”.
NHS Sussex ICB discharge improvement lead, Sarah Farragher, said that the dashboard “demonstrates the power of health technology to enhance our clinical workflows and improve our clinical systems” and also commented: “The health data will also enable us to plan, and commission community services including dementia services.”
Joe Emery, transfer of care hub manager for West Sussex, added that the dashboard will “support practitioners to enable patients to recover better and faster by ensuring they get to their destination more quickly”.
Also from the region, Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust (SCFT) has awarded a contract for a dental patient management software service to Newcastle-based Systems for Dentists Limited, for a reported value of 107,117.50.
Sussex Health and Care has also shared an update on the integrated care system’s work with digital technology, one year after the publication of their Improving Lives Together strategy which pledged to improve the use of digital technology and information to help join up services and support access to advice and care.
