Case Study by Insource.
Mid and South Essex ICS create a single waiting list across the integrated care system to speed up elective recovery and help drive down the backlogs.
The project will give a single view for all clinicians and operational managers across the ICS of exactly who is waiting for acute care, how long, for which specialty and what their clinical priority is – so the most urgent and those waiting longest can be treated first. This project is also providing the opportunity to look at and standardise processes across the ICS.
Unifying data across three sites
Covering 1.2 million people and 17 organisations Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System is working in partnership with Insource, to combine and standardise data from its three independent PAS systems at the three acute hospital sites: one instance of Lorenzo and two separate instances of Medway.
The Insource data management platform has now consolidated and quality-checked this diverse data to deliver 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, all the way from referral, through outpatients and diagnostics, to treatment and discharge. It will automatically be refreshed daily and becomes the single source of information across the ICS for elective patient pathway planning.
Barry Frostick, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Board, stated, “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.”
First task – driving down elective waits
Whilst the solution is collecting data on the full patient journey, both RTT and non RTT pathways, plus theatre and emergency data, the first task is to reduce the backlogs. So, getting a clear view of the RTT elective pathways, and prioritising patients against clinical need and long waiters, is taking precedence.
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.
You can read the case study in full here.
