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CASE STUDY: NHS TAYSIDE

NHS Tayside and Catalyst BI have come together to deliver a pioneering integrated hub for service capacity across the Health Board, resulting in the delivery of exceptional patient care.

CLIENT
NHS Tayside - www.nhstayside.scot.nhs.uk
PROJECT
Real-time solutions for Patient Flow Management across multiple hospital sites.
WHAT WE DID
Introduction of Athena Command Centre - an integrated physical hub For service capacity.
TIMELINE
The build took three weeks and the entire diagnostics and implementation just three months.

PROJECT INFORMATION

NHS Tayside lacked visibility of patient flow; an understanding of the demand coming in to their hospitals, and the current state of beds across hospitals. This created delays in understanding patient flow and being able to see and respond to pressures and bottlenecks in real-time. Their situation was as follows:

  • Patient flow management was undertaken within ‘hospital huddles’, meeting three times daily
  • Nursing staff presented information on paper on their current occupied and empty beds, and admissions for the previous day to admin staff
  • Admin staff would then enter this information into a spreadsheet and circulate to the hospital huddle staff.

Before Catalyst the NHS Tayside had no:

  • Visibility of real-time ambulance information
  • Predicted arrivals or admissions by time slot throughout the day, beyond the total number of estimated admissions for the day
  • Visibility of the hospital’s current state for staff on call who spent a considerable amount of time trying to find this out

With this in mind, the aim of this project was to create a Command Centre to support the organisation with real-time information on activity in a dynamic, usable format, to enable the clinical and operational teams to make faster and more evidence based decisions regarding care across the hospital setting.

THE RELATIONSHIP

Catalyst have worked with NHS Tayside for over six years and supported their use of the Qlik platform to maximise the value they get from the vast amounts of data that are processed every second at the Health Board. NHS Tayside have continued to use analytics to adapt their processes to ensure that they can continue to deliver exceptional patient care. The last few years have especially been challenging with Covid-19 causing huge upheaval across the NHS. NHS Tayside were able to analyse their data and implement suitable Covid-19 and non Covid-19 virtual wards to help them have detailed control over managing the flow of patients through the Hospital.

Challenges Solved

Live view of their current bed state
Analysts can now spend time working on specific research projects, rather than just telling people what the numbers are
Health and social care partnerships now have an escalation policy which is reflected in the Command Centre regarding the number of delayed discharges i.e. patients medically fit for discharge. As this is colour-coded, when things reach ‘Amber’, wards immediately contact the health and social care partnership to accelerate processes.
Enabled NHS Tayside to monitor the situation and deploy staff effectively across both COVID-19 and non COVID-19 pathways depending on fluctuating demand.”
Consultants can now see the demand within the Emergency Department and identify where any bottlenecks are.

Helps their operations become much slicker and far more dynamic

Aids suppliers with building inventory, as it helps planning around how much they need to make, how many pallets are required  and even how many delivery drivers

Fencing suppliers use i-supply to work out the demand at store level of their top four products. They can be discerning in where they send panels to, avoiding those who already have stock or who, historically, for whatever reason have not experienced a high level of sales.

THE IMPROVEMENTS

Time Reduction in admin burden on clinical staff with ability to release time back to patient care.  
Flexibility Flexibility to meet new demands urgently – Covid / Remobilisation / Predictions dashboards.  
VISBILITY Visibility of patient flow from ambulance arrival to leaving hospital, with predictions for the day ahead to allow planning within safety huddles.