Integrated health services, that work for people
The NHS has shifted focus to integrated care. Joined up services between GPs, community and hospitals. The goal being to improve end to end care and gain system level efficiencies. To enable this the NHS needs integrated data. NHS England selected Sussex NHS as a ‘digital aspirant’ and provided access to change funding to capitalise upon new digital capabilities to support integration.
The challenge for an NHS trust or Integrated Care System is to spend this money effectively. Many Digital projects fail and fail because they do not provide value to the users – in this case the users are influential clinicians who must adopt these systems and see the value in the wider data available to support their daily work.
As a design partner for Sussex we helped to ensure successful implementation of a number of digital initiatives including; integrated hospital discharge at a system level involving over 20 organisations, electronic patient record programs for community and frailty and surgery services, virtual wards.
SCFT winners of CIO of the year 2022 & Digital Org of year 2024
“Don’t build expensive shit the clinicians won’t use”
SCFT winners of CIO of the year 2022 & Digital Org of year 2024
“Don’t build expensive shit the clinicians won’t use”
- Diarmaid Crean - CIO Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust
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Challenge
Hospital Discharge
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A pressing NHS priority, locally and nationally, is to make sure that hospital inpatients are able to return to their homes as quickly as possible, when it is medically safe to do so.
How to increase the speed and efficiency of inpatient discharge from hospital to home is complex. One opportunity is to streamline the use and sharing of information between clinical teams.
Benefits include improving staff satisfaction, the patient experience and flow. Ultimately we see the opportunity to reduce hospital stay durations and save significant costs. This can be achieved by supporting an integrated care system between hospital and community Trusts.
Integrated hospital discharge – a project story.
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Approach
Starting with staff and patients to define the opportunity and how to unlock the bottleneck
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Service design enabled a collaborative environment which brought staff and patients’ perspectives together. Grounding the research in patient and staff experiences brought a human perspective to the solutions, capturing their expectations and ideas for change.
We visualised opportunities in the service blueprint & future data flow scenarios between the different system organisations. Starting with two trusts as a proof of concept we moved on to a whole system level with over 20 organisations across Sussex. A ‘digital frontrunner’ project.
Working from the visual representations of the blueprint and data flows, we informed the future data architecture and the opportunities for redesign of the discharge process.
Recommendations covered strategic and operational areas beyond digital solutions, including other service areas which would benefit from this approach, for example Hospital at Home or Virtual Wards.
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Outcome
Proof, models, capabilities – and value
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From this work, the Sussex integrated care system had a shared view of how the discharge process can be improved by sharing data more effectively. It saved the information systems team valuable time, enabling them to work towards implementing solutions rapidly.
At the end of the project, we produced a service blueprint, data flows, and data documentation. These tools were used by the ICS team to develop a roadmap to implement an integrated data sharing environment for care processes between hospital and community services.
Identified benefits included:
- Reduced length of stay in hospital
- Better management of resources; staff spent less time chasing information
- Improved staff satisfaction
- More timely & regular engagement with patients, improving customer satisfaction
- A single element of this strategy, a shared care record, identified a £20m saving per annum.
A single element of this strategy, a Transfer of Care hub, identified a £20m saving per annum.
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