London North West team saves over 20,000 bed days a year

A care coordination platform is helping the ‘hospital at home’ team at London North West University Healthcare Trust to save over 20,000 bed days in one year, by supporting early discharge from hospital and reducing admissions and readmissions.

The short-term assessment, rehabilitation and reablement service (STARRS) staff at the trust have been using the platform from Infinity Health to manage and coordinate their workload and to communicate with each other.

Since it was implemented in January 2020, the solution has replaced paper lists, telephone calls and face-to-face handovers to boost capacity in the team so more patients can be supported by the London North West service.

The STARRS team – who provides acute-level care in patients’ homes – saw a 43% increase in patients in January 2023, compared to January 2020. In 2022 it cared for 3,732 patients at home, an increase from 2,689 patients in 2020, freeing up an estimated 20,899 additional bed days.

The service also saw a 62% increase in tasks per staff member, which means the 27-55% capacity increase predicted at the start of the project has been realised.

Devaneson Robert, service manager – STARRS, London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “Infinity has helped us to manage our caseload safely and efficiently and support more patients to recover in their own home.

“This in turn helps to free up beds for patients who need to receive treatment in hospital. It also helps us to help staff so they can concentrate on their clinical role and protect their own health and wellbeing.”

The Infinity solution allows the multidisciplinary team to create, assign and track tasks in real-time on any modern device.

Once logged in staff can view critical patient information as needed, giving them visibility of which team member is doing what task for which patients, as well as the task status. This ensures no task is missed, helping to improve patients’ clinical safety.

Staff are also able to prioritise their workload efficiently.

Elliott Engers, CEO, Infinity Health, said: “At the start of this project we estimated an increase in capacity to see more patients but opening up 20,000 bed days in one year has a significant impact on overstretched hospitals. We want to provide all NHS staff with the right tools to make their workload more manageable, save time, and reduce stress.”

London North West University Healthcare Trust has also earlier this year completed a two-year project to digitise 210,000 patient records, using IMMJ Systems’ MediViewer to go entirely paperless.