For our most recent LinkedIn poll, we asked our audience what their organisation most needed to improve patient flow – knowledge of where challenges are, funding for digital tools, being better at identifying gaps, or an organisational real-time situational view.
Of the votes received, the majority said that an organisational real-time situational view would be the most helpful in terms of improving patient flow, with this option receiving 32 percent of votes and voters from professions including data analytics and AI expert, B2B operations coordinator, and chief digital and technology officer.
Funding for digital tools claimed 24 percent of votes, including from a chief digital information officer, test analyst, primary care network manager and project manager. On level with this, 24 percent of voters said that getting better at identifying gaps was most needed to help patient flow, with voters including practice manager, medical statistician and corporate director.
20 percent voters said that knowing where the challenges are would be the most helpful, with voters for this option including consultant in anaesthesia & critical care, PCN clinical pharmacy technician, PCN digital and transformation lead, and consultant physiotherapist.
What would your vote have been? To ensure you don’t miss out on future polls, please click here to connect with us on LinkedIn.
HTN previously hosted a panel discussion patient flow and virtual care, welcoming Dr Penny Kechagioglou, chief clinical information officer and deputy chief medical officer at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire; Lee Rickles, chief information officer at Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust; and Paul Deffley, UK chief medical officer for Alcidion. As part of the discussion, Penny noted that improving patient flow needs to be a “collaborative, iterative process” with a need to “think about your population needs, who you are going to partner with [and] understand your data. Then you build a workflow or a series of workflows which are integrated across the system.”
Lee agreed: “I think it comes back to identifying what patient flow actually means to you and the problems you are trying to achieve. You need to look at things like the number of incidents that have occurred during provision of care – they are the areas that you should probably focus on. You need evidenced problems, not just a gut feel.”
Catch up on the panel here to read their insights in full.
