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.
NHS Tayside - www.nhstayside.scot.nhs.uk
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.
- Now able to assist in improving patient flow, support clinicians in patient centred decisions and enhance collaborative discussions and decision making
THE IMPROVEMENTS
"The Command Centre enables our team working and excellent clinical and organisational skills to achieve even better experiences and outcomes for patients by providing the information necessary to facilitate this. Key statistics, metrics and graphs shared in one environment provide an immediate common understanding of the key dynamics of the hospitals."
"Importantly we did not only want to know where we had been so far in the day, nor were at a particular moment, but to have the facility to predict what the rest of the working day would look like in respect of demand and capacity. This would enable change actions which anticipated, and so provided for, challenges in the patient flow, demand/ capacity profile."
"Access to the Command Centre has been very beneficial in terms of our ongoing development of the Discharge Hub service. Specifically, we are currently further embedding sub teams within the Multi-disciplinary Team structures on key wards which promote better communication and pathways through specialisms, e.g. from Acute Receiving Wards to a Medicine for the Elderly ward. The Discharge Team staff in these areas can use the Command Centre to scrutinise demand through these pathways which helps them to plan proactively and therefore avoid delayed discharges (patients medically fit for discharge still in hospital)."
"In terms of COVID-19 planning, the Command Centre has enabled us to monitor the situation and deploy staff effectively across both COVID-19 and non COVID-19 pathways depending on fluctuating demand."
"Obviously you consider doing things in-house, as we have skilled developers and have built many dashboards over the years, but these things all take time and you have to be able to think out of the box. Once we looked at everything, we estimated that the project would take six to nine months to complete and we wouldn’t have achieved the same end result. So, we got the experts in to build it with us. Catalyst BI showed us what was possible."
READ THE FULL CASE STUDY
Download the full case study and see how by using a combination of real-time data, predictive analytics and automated report distribution, NHS Tayside have been able to assist in improving patient flow, supports clinicians in patient centred decisions and enhance collaborative discussions and decision making
