Mid and South Essex ICS deploys unified patient tracking list

Mid and South Essex Care Partnership Integrated Care System (ICS) has deployed a platform which has helped create a single, system-wide patient tracking list in order to support its elective recovery programme.

The single wait list is hosted on Insource Ltd’s data management platform and covers all specialties across all the acute sites within the ICS, from referral through to treatment or discharge.

Mid and South Essex hope that it will create the data foundation needed to support staff in tackling the backlog in elective care. The new resource will also help minimise long waits, as well as ensure fair patient scheduling and maximise bed and theatre capacity site-wide.

The fully-linked patient tracking list (PTL) delivers end-to-end Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting lists and is aggregated to ICS level. Automatically refreshed daily, it will provide a single source of information across the ICS for patient pathway planning.

Barry Frostick, chief digital and information officer for Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Board, said: “At Mid and South Essex we were particularly hard hit by a couple of covid waves resulting in significant elective care backlogs, with some specialties waiting much longer than we would want.

“We see our strategic partnership with Insource on the elective recovery programme as a real opportunity to prioritise patients according to clinical need and length of wait, to standardise clinical processes across our multiple sites and to maximise our system-wide waiting list capacity. Having a single, robust, fully validated PTL for all clinicians to refer to is a massive first step.”

Mid and South Essex’s elective care programme is underpinned by the Insource elective recovery suite. This includes system-wide waiting list management and statutory reporting, agile capacity and bed occupancy planning, clinical and theatre scheduling and patient journey analytics. The data drawn from this will help to improve processes across the ICS and streamline care pathways.

Naresh Chenani, director of planning and performance, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, said: “In line with the NHS Data Saves Lives policy, one of our strategic objectives is to become a data driven organisation. We are now in the enviable position of having all the data in one place – a single source of the truth – for informed decision-making across the ICS.

“We have a consolidated view of the waiting list position, so we can ensure patients are treated against clinical priority and date order. And, our clinicians and operational staff will shortly have visibility of the unified PTL so we can see how best to allocate staff, theatre and bed resources to boost productivity and drive waiting times down.”

The programme is run on a hybrid-cloud strategy which means back-ups are made both on-premise and on Azure cloud to ensure seamless disaster recovery.

Sam Elliot, CEO, Insource, said: “Building a single, fully validated, automated PTL across an ICS may be our bread and butter, but it is also providing the data foundation for a wide range of planning, performance, clinical and process improvement initiatives that could revolutionise care delivery going forward.”

The Insource tool is now ensuring that data is being collected and the next step for the trust is to involve clinicians and operational staff. An operational go-live is planned for early May.

Earlier this month Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust has teamed up with eConsult to deliver a patient management system designed to reduce the waiting list backlog.