This guest insight from Alcidion, headline sponsor of techUK's Health and Social Care Industry Dinner, explores the importance of streamlining patient journeys and how to achieve this.
Flow Management - Streamlining Patient Journeys
The balance between demand and supply is ever present for healthcare organisations. Effectively allocating available resources to address competing priorities is a challenge when the required information to make decisions is not readily available. This is further heightened with seasonal impacts such as winter pressures.
Realising a streamlined patient journey without an accurate view of information is close to impossible. Clinicians and management need real-time access to make educated and effective decisions.
A digital solution with the necessary level of interoperability is the most viable solution to this challenge, consolidating data from disparate systems to a meaningful, consistent and engaging user interface means that decisions can be made with confidence.
The Patient Journey
The patient journey across a care continuum is a transition through a series of clinical processes, each with logistics support. This includes a range of clinical interventions critical to achieving the best clinical outcomes. It draws on the scarce, high-value skills of clinicians and places significant demand on available resources.
Logistics are necessary to support these clinical processes. If these logistics are poorly structured, they waste valuable clinical time and inhibit optimal care delivery.
Technology can streamline healthcare delivery by consolidating disparate inputs and presenting the resulting information in an intuitive real-time visualisation aligned with user needs. It must highlight key information to inform decision making and optimise resource utilisation.
Of course, integration is key to achieving this consolidation of data, allowing information to be ingested from third party systems across the trust. The value is ultimately assessed by the ease of use which is focussed on presenting information that is immediately understandable, highlighting critical details to better manage and enable proactive planning. A patient flow system should ensure that every patient journey is safe, clinically effective, satisfying for patients and staff and as efficient as possible.
A Patient Flow System
Patient flow systems underpin the optimal sequencing and communication of clinical processes to facilitate timely and effective clinical care, with efficient logistics to avoid unnecessary delays and promote safe care delivery. They support clinicians by maintaining a focus on the patient's clinical risk and embed efficient logistics support, to minimise the length of stay and maximise patient and staff satisfaction.
Clinicians need access to an extensive scope of information in real-time. It must be based on user centred design and presented in a meaningful paradigm to ensure immediate understanding. Electronic patient journey boards further enhance the presentation of this information. Clinical decision support can be used to enhance this visualisation providing relevant notifications and flexibility is required to support differing information needs across service types and locations.
A patient flow system should realise a significant time dividend to the care team and support staff, every time they use the solution to optimise the patient experience. This goal can be realised through the solution linking clinical processes with fast, effective supporting logistics.
The need to understand operations extends to the enterprise level. Access to a graphical, real-time view of the status of all resources including patients, beds and wards informs decision making. Overall visibility of all occupancy, resources, services and expected patient movements is necessary to manage efficiently. That is, a helicopter view referencing real-time information. Decisions can be made with confidence resulting in streamlined patient journeys and optimal resource assignment.
Smart Platform for Healthcare
Alcidion's Miya Precision is a modular next-generation healthcare analytics platform that has the potential to address clinical problems with the application of smart technology such as Artificial Intelligence and Clinical Decision Support.
It facilitates a modular approach to address clinical workflows and manage associated processes with the capability to establish a longitudinal patient record. The Miya Platform is an open standards-based platform that leverages the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) to overcome interoperability challenges.
The Miya Flow module is specifically designed to support the clinical and operational needs of a hospital to streamline patient care while, in parallel, improving effectiveness and efficiency. It is deployed in UK, Australian and New Zealand hospitals presenting clinical and operational staff with a single point of reference.
One NHS customer said:
The journey boards have enabled us to make sure that 100% of our patients have an estimated date of discharge recorded and that helps wards to make sure it is met, which helps to address the huge pressure we are under.
About Alcidion
Alcidion is an Australian health informatics company with a simple purpose, that is, to transform healthcare with proactive, smart, intuitive technology solutions that improve the efficiency and quality of patient care in healthcare organisations. Alcidion operates across the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to now service over 300 hospitals and 70 healthcare organisations. Find out more at https://www.alcidion.com/