NHS England is reporting substantial benefits in supporting hospitals and patients from the early use of two data systems that are now being rolled out nationally.
Ayub Bhayat, the organisation’s director of data services and deputy chief data and analytics officer, described the achievements of the Care Coordination Solution and Optica application at this week’s UKAuthority AI and Data4Good conference.
Both systems have been developed by NHS England as part of its effort to intensify the use of data tools based on the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It identified a need to better prioritise the treatment of patients and ensured facilities and clinicians’ time were used more effectively.
“So working with clinicians and operational staff on the ground we developed the Care Coordination Solution,” Bhayat said. “It enables activities in terms of exposing waiting lists for consultants, ensuring theatre productivity is maximised, and how it supports the prioritisation of outpatients.”
It includes modules for elective waiting list management, theatre scheduling, outpatients management and referral to treatment validation.
Extensive integration
“We basically integrated a lot of the data from different systems including rostering and preoperative systems,” he said. “None of this information sits in one place, you have to liberate the data, and as we have done that it has had a tremendous impact.
“It has allowed us to go forward with activities such as recommending to consultants which patient is best suited to available minutes in a session.”
The system has so far been deployed at 35 hospital trusts, with more to come and 26 reporting benefits from its use. A number of quantitative benefits have been reported, including that 13.3% of patients on waiting lists were flagged as priorities for investigation, and operating theatre utilisation increased by an average of 6.3% across 22 trusts.
In addition, significant numbers of patients on waiting lists have been flagged for investigation or requested for removal as no longer needing to be seen.
The Optica application has been developed on the Foundry platform by the NECS team in NHS England with North Tees and Hartlepool Foundation Trust to track admitted patients and tasks related to their discharge. It has been integrated with hospital electronic patient records, laboratory and social care systems to ensure all the relevant information is available in one place.
It provides actionable intelligence for care teams to properly plan timely discharges to avoid delays in patients leaving hospitals, and to understand the reasons for any delays.
Quantitive gains
Bhayat said the application is now in use at 12 trusts and the results have included 50% fewer patients than the national average occupying a hospital bed for 21 days or more, a 36% reduction in the average number of delay days, and a 25% reduction in long length of stay patients.
This has prompted a forecast that on a national scale it could save 1.8 million delay days over 21 days per patient, equivalent to £700 million.
“These are amazing numbers, and the qualitative benefits are far higher,” he said. “We are receiving regular feedback from individuals across hospitals telling us how easier it is making their daily lives in running their hospitals.”
