Teaching Hospitals
Digitally transforming an orthopaedic trauma department
Open Medical digitally transformed orthoapedic trauma care at West Hertfordshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust with a solution designed to the needs of the department. A seamless digital solution was required, incorporating both referral pathways and encapsulating the full patient journey: from injury to rehab. Pathpoint eTrauma is now revolutionising how the team manages its acute admissions and virtual fracture clinic.
Challenges
West Hertfordshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is a busy regional centre with 600 beds and 9 theatres. In 2017-18, the Trust received 139,000 emergency attendances.
Alongside the acute orthopaedic trauma referrals, a further 6,000 referrals were made through the virtual fracture clinic (VFC).
The team at the Trust was struggling with the increasing number of referrals, significant time spent identifying patients’ location in the care system, and coordinating their care through multiple channels, including ward lists, multiple whiteboards, and paper theatre lists.
Solution
A platform with its functionality fully focused on Trauma & Orthopaedics, enabling the clinical team to configure pathways designed to centralise and streamline orthopaedic patient care.
As a cloud-based service, it is fully accessible from any desktop computer within the Trust, as well as personal devices. In accordance with NHS data interoperability requirements, Pathpoint eTrauma has FHIR-approved endpoints that connect with any existing eMR/ePR systems.
Cloud-based platform with complete trauma list coordination, including digital trauma take and handover, real-time breach warning to ensure Best Tariff Attainment, semi-elective trauma scheduling and much more.
Certified safe and secure environment to store patient data and share information between doctors.
We had no straightforward way to identify and audit the key information that would enable us to plan ahead for service provision. We were aware of factors impacting our service - we just didn’t have the access to our own data that could tell us this.
As is traditional, our junior doctors were writing their own paper lists, but the information they were documenting wasn’t uniform in every case. We needed to ensure that every patient in our care came with the same minimum dataset of information in order to prioritise efficiently; to plan clinics and schedule theatre time.
Martina Wade
Trauma Manager – Watford General Hospital
Since implementing Pathpoint we have reduced the length of stay by a full day. Over a year this means a big saving. We have an improved perspective on our business case, enabling us to make an accurate plan a year ahead.
Martina Wade
Tauma Manager – Watford General Hospital
Pathpoint is used by clinicians in over 75 NHS sites nationwide. It’s a versatile and highly customisable, clinically coded pathway management system. As a cloud-based platform, the product is deployed remotely, with a full implementation within days and user training on-site. Unique requirements and pathway mapping are supported by the in-house blended clinical and engineering team. The platform is fully interoperable with any NHS IT systems in accordance with the highest NHS IG standards.
Outcomes
Cost saving
£1,464,500 cost saving
91% of femoral neck fractures operated within 36 hours
Target achievement
48% of patients treated with validated protocols from point of care 25% requiring no further attendance
Minimised attendance
12% decrease in admissions. Reduced length of stay of a trauma patient from 8 days to 7 days
Reduced length of stay
20% time reduction from injury to treatment
Reduced time to treatment
5 min maximum time for all assessments done on eTrauma
Highly efficient
Improved coordination of trauma care 26% of trauma list patients operated as planned day case procedures
