North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust switches on RealTime

15th December, 2011

Whitehaven marks the start of a trust-wide rollout of the award-winning RealTime software as part of a process change improvement programme aimed at releasing time to care, reducing length of stay and improving patient experience

 

went live with RealTime in Whitehaven at the beginning of October 2011, and is now preparing to roll out the system across the Trust.

 

RealTime is a key component of the NCUH Trust’s “ForWard” improvement programme — a clinically driven programme of performance improvement that is reengineering the processes for managing patient journeys on the wards of the Trust. ForWard aims to improve patient experience, release time to care for staff, and reduce length of stay. ForWard is improving quality of care through remodelled processes that enable clinical best practice targets to be achievable and consistently met by everybody involved in the delivery of care. RealTime reduces length of stay by enabling all aspects of discharge planning to be clinically driven and collaboratively managed across all the services and agencies that are involved in delivering that care. RealTime integrates bi-directionally with existing systems such as the Trust’s Patient Administration System to track, monitor and drive in one place all information in real time that healthcare professionals need to manage patient journeys optimally.

 

RealTime was switched on first in the Patterdale and Pillar wards in Whitehaven, which as acute surgical and acute medical wards are key to the start of so many patients’ journeys through the hospital. The ForWard programme is moving to a full rollout Trust-wide from 5 December 2011, completing the go-live in Whitehaven before moving on to Carlisle.

 

Feedback from staff about RealTime has been enthusiastic.

 

“RealTime is speeding up the process of inpatient assessments and handovers and ensuring this happens much earlier in the patient’s journey,” says Lesley Carruthers, Head of Nursing: “It’s been great, and I take my hat off to the nurses, the trainers, the IT team, and everybody else involved in the rollout. This is a very ambitious change management project and everybody has done such an amazing job. Nursing staff have switched seamlessly from paper to electronic assessments and will extend their interaction with the system through nursing observations and acuity scores, which is going to release significant time to care.”

 

RealTime increases transparency of relevant information on the patients’ status throughout their journey and facilitates the collaboration between staff in the ward, hospital and community services. RealTime uses real time dashboards that display the current status in terms of discharge planning and care pathway for all patients at a glance. The software also incorporates KPI dashboards that track care quality commission targets and triggers alerts instantaneously, all monitored in real time and visible to all involved in the patient’s care journey.

 

The benefits that are immediately available through switching on RealTime are numerous. Speeding up inpatient assessments, for example, reduces risk; RealTime makes it possible to track CQC targets in a live environment; alerts such as the risk of falls score or infection status are immediately visible; data quality and timely data entry have been transformed, which has triggered at least one change request to the supplier of the Trust’s PAS; quality of care increases; performance increases; collaborative working methods are far more powerfully supported; increased data quality is leading to better coding which equates immediately to less lost income to the Trust; there are closer links with social services; infection alerting is now automated and immediately visible hospital-wide, triggering alerts in PAS in real time;  collaboration with Primary Care is now much easier; huge performance improvements are already being felt through a reduction in the manual processes involved in patient flow management; and so on.

 

“This is patient flow management, not bed management,” says Mark Thomas, Director of IM&T at the Trust. “RealTime is helping us to focus on the real work of looking after patient and we are delighted to be leading the way here in the North West by rolling out RealTime in Whitehaven and Carlisle. The system is flexible, easy to use, and well liked, and the eLearning programmes that our change management experts have assembled are making it easy to teach. We are in an intensive programme of transformation here in North Cumbria and RealTime’s role in the ForWard project is key to the success of this programme. RealTime helps us to collaborate on patients’ journeys across numerous levels, services and agencies, ensuring clinical best practice and an ability to manage patient journeys to clinical best practice targets, leading to reduced length of stay and numerous other benefits. RealTime has rapidly won hearts and minds across the board and is exciting a lot of interest, both inside and outside the Trust.”

 

Jim Gabriel, CEO of RealTime, added: “The work that Mark Thomas and his teams are accomplishing in North Cumbria is exceptional, and we are delighted to be working with such forward-looking healthcare professionals. This is exactly what RealTime was designed to facilitate, and the RealTime-driven rapid reduction in the average length of stay will lead fairly rapidly to impressive benefits realisation. North Cumbria University Hospitals can look forward to freeing up so many resources through improvements to the delivery of care that the savings will be counted in millions.”

 

 

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