Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) has become the first organisation in the UK to deploy Altera Digital Health’s patient flow solution. The Trust expects the system to be integral in realising operational efficiencies and improving patient safety and care, including making discharge more streamlined.
The system has gone live at the Trust’s Royal Albert Edward Infirmary, which provides a base for emergency and acute services for 326,000 local people. Ward staff, along with the bed management, portering, domestic, and infection prevention and control teams, are using the system either directly or via integration with its existing Altera Sunrise EPR system.
Altera Patient Flow is providing visibility of capacity with real-time insight into bed status, bed availability and patient movement across the whole hospital that it didn’t have before. Greater oversight is making it possible to take a proactive approach to manage emergency and elective patient flow.
Pam Green, Deputy Director for Clinical Informatics and Chief Nursing Information Officer at WWL, said: “Overall the rollout has been really successful. Staff have embraced the change and the technology adoption has been brilliant. They understand that by supporting the service improvement it won’t just make a difference to their working day but will ultimately have a big impact on our patients. We’ve had some very positive feedback from staff in terms of usability and accessibility and releasing time to reinvest back into patient care.”
Patient Flow has digitally transformed the portering and domestic workflows. Instead of tracking tasks with pen and paper, the domestic team can move around with an iPad, which clearly shows their job list. Similarly, the portering team’s radios have been replaced by iPhones to manage requests and worklists via an app.
The domestic team is benefitting from the system automatically allocating jobs in the vicinity where they’ve finished cleaning a bed to streamline workflow and use capacity as effectively as possible. If a bed is reserved in the system, a priority clean will automatically be generated for the bed over others that are vacant. This enables patients to move around the hospital more quickly and efficiently.
Kevin Parker-Evans, Chief Nursing Officer at WWL, said: “The digital transformation has driven a significant culture change. Throughout my career bed management has always been a paper collation exercise, but paper is never live. By the time you’ve finished gathering the information it will have changed. That’s why the bed managers particularly like the bed board in the system. They can access a real-time glance of every bed on site, which shows whether a bed is occupied/vacant, along with the cleaning status. It’s given us a true live state and now we intend to use it to navigate our bed and capacity meetings.”
The solution is also giving the Trust oversight of capacity from an infection prevention perspective. Staff can see areas that are infected and can’t be used or need reviewing. Historically, this was managed with spreadsheets. If a patient has an infection status and they leave a bed permanently, the system will automatically generate a bed clean to increase resource utilisation and minimise delays.
The Trust is also using the system to improve discharge processes to gain further efficiency savings. With bed management, a lot of time was wasted by staff being reliant on manually collecting discharge data by visiting each ward. Patient Flow will automate these processes and give more visibility and autonomy to manage the flow of patients who are coming on and off the wards, helping the Trust increase the number of patients that are discharged before midday.
Following a current/future state analysis, the Trust is projected to double the number of people discharged before noon. Longer term, it is aiming to achieve 40% of morning discharges by 10 a.m.
Mary Fleming, Chief Executive of WWL, said: “WWL is a digitally enabled Trust following investment in our EPR infrastructure and combined with patient flow management it will provide crucial real-time data for decision-making. This will play a major role in creating a seamless, integrated healthcare system that prioritises patient needs, enhances staff efficiency and keeps pace with the demands of the modern healthcare landscape.”
