Ashford & St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Trust
Ashford & St Peter’s NHS Trust has reported on the success of business intelligence solutions developed jointly with Ardentia, which have reduced Referral to Treatment times and ensured more timely access to care for patients.
Pathway Manager Improves 18-Week Wait Performance
The customised business intelligence solution has significantly improved 18-week wait performance, with 95% of all patients treated within the 18-week timeframe, up from 59% two years previously.
Andrew Davies, Information Consultant at Ashford & St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Trust explained: Ardentia’s Healthware Manager generates an email-based waiting list template highlighting patient progress within their pathway. This is then automatically sent to healthcare managers within the different departments, alerting them to potential RTT breaches at an early stage, and exposing the root cause so they can manage care delivery effectively.
“The Trust now has a powerful tool to interrogate data and to drill down to access specific patient data to aid clinical decision-making. Better quality data, and more of it, has given us improved visibility of patient pathways and progress, enabling us to improve care delivery and successfully meet RTT and other reporting requirements.”
Ashford St Peter’s information team worked with Ardentia to link its own in-house pathway analysis database with Ardentia’s Cassius and Healthware Manager, using the systems to report on the inpatient, outpatient and A&E contract data collected and then to send it to the Secondary Usage Service.
The collaborative route gave the Trust a reporting solution customised to meet its exact operating requirements. The intuitive user interface, functionality and flexibility of the Ardentia tools have improved access to data and made it easier for staff to collect and report data.
The Ardentia solution also allows staff to drill down through the email to access patient records using NetQuery, in order to get detailed data on specific patient cases. The system enables staff to access the forms needed to allow record validation, streamlining the process of managing patient pathways.
In addition, the Trust now benefits from a centralised data repository which can be used Trust-wide to create the reports needed to ensure evidence-based decision making and robust business management.
Staff from departments across both Trust sites can access the web-based centralised data centre to access the information they need for operational performance reports, and can drill down to access information on Trust performance for cancer treatment, MRSA and A&E targets, as well as RTT and other reporting requirements.
