Bolton NHS Foundation Trust has upgraded its patient flow technology with a deployment of the Miya Flow system.
It went live with the software from health tech company Alcidion at the Royal Bolton Hospital in May.
The system uses journey boards to show live bed status and helps clinical and operational teams to understand where patients are, from admission to discharge, in their hospital journey.
It is aimed at removing the need for patient flow teams to manually phone wards to identify capacity, and is supporting staff as they manage the admission, care and discharge of patients.
Miya Flow has been integrated with the hospital’s clinical systems to enable staff to record information once without having to log in and out of different applications.
The trust was already using Miya Observations, widely known in the NHS as Patientrack, to identify patients at risk of harm and deterioration.
Fundamental effort
Dawn Devine, head of clinical systems at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, said: “This deployment represents a fundamental part of our plans to embed a control centre within the trust.
“More immediately it provides our teams with a visual way of tracking of patient flow, in a similar way that airports can track all their departures and arrivals. This will only help to enhance both patient experience and patient safety.”
Imran Khan, urgent care lead at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, said: “From a clinical perspective, this is groundbreaking for us, and means we can visually map out a patient’s treatment in a way that tells a story.
“Having one source of information to support patient flow, means a better, safer experience for patients and staff. I believe this will lead to significant time and cost savings, helping us to deliver of quality of care in a busy environment.”
Alcidion said the trust is known as an early adopter of patient flow technology in the NHS, having originally implemented ExtraMed in 2007. Miya Flow represents a significant upgrade to ExtraMed – which was acquired by Alcidion in 2021 – and is part of the Miya Precision real time FHIR platform, giving the trust a foundation interoperable FHIR data and access to the broader Miya suite of capabilities.
It added that initial meetings have been held with NHS England that could inform the development of ‘safer boards’, used on wards to highlight the risks and needs of individual patients on wards in support of enhanced flow.
