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Does bed-blocking impact your hospital efficiency? Is lack of coordinated care causing discharge delays? Would your service benefit from stronger communication across the multidisciplinary team? Could follow up care be more focused on individual patient needs? If so RioMed can help… Data recently released by the Department of Health identified that bed-blocking is a returning problem within the NHS. Over the last ten years healthcare professionals have worked together to provide integrated care pathways and keep the number of unnecessarily occupied beds to a minimum. However increasing pressures on services is demanding further efficiency. Alleviating this burden would also better enable hospitals to meet the 18 week referral to appointment target. Providing a patient with a hospital bed costs approximately £275 per day (NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement 2011) on top of this considerable proportion of budget spend hospitals can be fined if support is not in place for patients to leave on time. Recent reports suggest bed-blocking has risen 16% over the past 12 months and cost the NHS over £239 million (Telegraph 2011). Can your hospital afford not to address this growing problem? Bed-blocking is does not only impact on service efficiency, meeting of targets and adherence to budgets it also has consequences for patients, as Dr Ian Donald, of the British Geriatrics Society highlights; "Delayed discharges are not just statistics, but individual patients who are frail and vulnerable. To them and their families it can feel like they are stuck and lost in the system." This article demonstrates how Cellma can help alleviate the problem, improve service efficiency and monitor patient emotional wellbeing during the discharge process. Full clinical and managerial functionality is provided through a range of modules, including; full management of patient administration and scheduling, standardised assessments, virtual wards, automatically generated GP/patient follow up letters, and reporting. Additionally integration with pre-existing departmental or hospital systems such as PAS, pathology, imaging, DEXA and legacy databases facilitates seamless healthcare.
Cellma encourages patients to be involved in their care throughout and beyond their hospital stay. Self-assessments and patient questionnaires gather clinical and demographic data and facilitate collection of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) as recommended by The Department of Health. Collection of patient’s opinions also reduces feelings of abandonment or being forgotten.
By standardising assessments Cellma ensures all healthcare professionals are collecting the same level of demographic and clinical data, promoting quality of care across the service and through the care pathway.
Cellma facilitates collection and sharing of data across the entire multidisciplinary service. Cellma uses service preferred patient identifiers, including NHS numbers, to prevent duplication of records. All data gathered from across the multidisciplinary team is stored on the individual patient record and accessible from any NHS terminal. This ensures all members in the multidisciplinary team have 24/7/365 access to up to date patient records.
Cellma’s PAS module allows a health organisation to handle all Registration, Admission, Discharge and Transfer (RADT) transactions, facilitating hassle free transfers; automatically updating the patient’s details (including any special requirements) to the new service. Referrals are managed throughout teams, departments and across external services.
Once discharged, Cellma is able to automatically generate GP letters and discharge summaries in under 60 seconds. This promotes the rapid communication of the patient data beyond their hospital stay and enables suitable care arrangements to be made.
Cellma holds details of patient interested parties to ensure relatives and carers receive information about the patient’s on-going care. Cellma can also automatically send informative leaflets promoting education of illnesses and patient needs.
Cellma can be accessed from any NHS terminal, facilitating remote working and follow ups of discharged patients. The data collected is stored on a remote/local server, but never on the individual machine, ensuring compliance to Information Governance guidelines.
The task functionality allows tasks to be set for individual patients or colleagues; these become flagged if overdue. This promotes timely responses which can help ensure discharge preparations and follow ups are made.
Cellma’s Ward & Bed Management module allows ward staff to manage all aspects of ward administration in a user friendly, electronic paperless way incorporating mobile and touch screen technologies. All registration, admission, transfer and discharge requests, along with all associated documentation can be easily handled for all planned and unplanned occupants. Ward managers can monitor live bed status, staffing levels and ward capacity levels as well as configure the bed layout of each individual ward to incorporate any special requirements.
In addition to the above features Cellma incorporates a comprehensive reporting module, further encouraging increased efficiency and reporting the services delivered.
Cellma reports on any/all data captured can be generated in a number of ways;
Provide a dynamic snapshot of user defined variables that are delivered as standard or easily customised by the user to fulfil their specific reporting requirements.
Identifies and collates cohorts of patients, for example those using a particular medication or sharing common demographic characteristics. Users define the parameters on which the report is based to generate tabular or graphic reports on any aspect of their clinical service in real time.
Parameters are set in advance by the user; pre-defined reports are often used to meet statutory or research requirements. Clients can write these reports in-house or RioMed can set Cellma to deliver them to the user at regular intervals |
