East Kent Hospitals pilots population health platform

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust has introduced a population health platform with the aim of reducing preoperative consultation times.

The trust deployed a digital dashboard from technology supplier Graphnet Health, in March 2024 to automate risk stratification and triage day patients awaiting preoperative assessment.

The dashboard combines data on surgical waiting lists with patient-level primary care records, allowing hospital teams to view primary care data for patients awaiting surgery so they can identify high and low-risk patients.

Dr Simon Rang, lead for perioperative medicine at East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “The results have been very positive.

“The time savings, for example, proved valuable as it allows more patients to be seen, and means we can allocate resources to additional triage and more complex patients”.

Rang added the dashboard’s digital risk stratification tool also helped improve productivity at the trust by scheduling high-risk patients for appointments with nurses and consultants.

There was a 27% reduction in consultation times for surgical day cases during a pilot of the tool between 21 April 2024 and 26 May 2024, according to an analysis by Graphnet.

During the pilot the platform was used to assess and triage 138 low-risk patients awaiting day-case surgery.

The platform triaged 77% of patients correctly, allowing the trust to cut average consultation times from 30 to 22 minutes.

Staff had to manually revise 23% of patients’ triage categories “due to incomplete patient information from primary care data,” Graphnet said.

East Kent Hospitals now plans to scale up use of the platform to undertake medical screening and triage all patients referred to the pre-surgical preparation service.

“We intend to tackle health inequalities by using the dashboard in a collaborative project with Kent Community Health Foundation Trust to identify cohorts of pre-surgical patients who would most benefit from community-based health promotion services whist waiting for elective surgery,” said Rang.

Meanwhile, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust announced in October 2023 that it had streamlined surgical pathways and tackled waiting lists by combining its surgical waiting lists with the Buckinghamshire Shared Care Record.