Utilising digital technology to enable whole-system integration in healthcare

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Here Lisa Riley, Vice President of Strategic Product and Partnership Development for the VitalHub group of companies in the UK, assesses how integrated digital healthcare is helping transform the NHS

Integrated care aims to improve the patient experience, achieve higher levels of efficiency, and add value to care systems within a healthcare economy.

However, while integrating service delivery and enabling service providers to work together within a local health economy is an admirable goal, it is often very difficult to achieve. The aim of integrated care is to counter the fragmentation of services and to enable more coordinated, more continuous and ultimately safer and better care for patients.

Historically, the main obstacle to optimized integration has been access to real-time data. Often times, the systems themselves do not have the ability or tools to communicate effectively, or they reside on servers that are inaccessible outside of the host organization, making integration impossible for providers. The complexity associated with changing any system would make it extremely difficult and extraordinarily expensive, so the ability to use the existing infrastructure in alternative ways and connect the dots for it is a preferable way to go.

This vision of integrated digital health care is supported by the British group VitalHub. The collective is a leading group of health technology organizations that simplify the complexities of data integration in planned and unplanned care.

Our award-winning portfolio includes solutions from Transforming Systems, Intouch with Health, Synopsis and MCAP, and together they play a pivotal role in helping the NHS unite healthcare providers with a cross-system approach to healthcare.

The range of innovative solutions offers digital transformation on a large scale and includes tools to effectively manage patient flow, demand and capacity, discharge optimization, overall system transparency, patient activity and operational processes.

Transforming Systems’ award-winning SHREWD portfolio of operations management tools plays a pivotal role in overall systems integration, ingesting complex digitized data from all providers across the healthcare industry, including independent and volunteer sector partners, and creating instant visibility from print to create a single version of the Truth.

Using retrospective data to investigate what could or should have happened in certain pathways is no longer necessary as SHREWD enables all users, whether strategic leaders or frontline teams, to spot early warnings in and around the broader infrastructure and better to inform them of what is going on, how it is happening.

This use of live data exchange helps provide the prescriptive information necessary to provide key information to decision makers to better coordinate and optimize patient care across geographic locations.

It provides a critical strategic overview of the growing pressures in both emergency and elective care in a region, helps with load balancing and supports mutual transfers of aid between providers, and enables an integrated, tactical response to ease the pressure To fix delays and improve supply delivery service.

Another support for overall system integration is the clinical decision support tool MCAP. MCAP (Making Care Appropriate for Patients) enables clinicians to make an objective, evidence-based assessment of whether patients are being treated at the right level of care in the right place based on their individual clinical needs. The system is used by clinical teams and broader system partners as a “single version of the truth” to identify patients who could safely be transferred to a different care level, either to another ward, in the community or ideally in the patient’s own home , with or without assistance.

Intouch with Health and Synopsis solutions are elective care platforms that help hospitals manage the entire patient workflow and efficiently optimize the flow of outpatient care and pre-surgical exams. All of these solutions are integrated with the hospital’s PAS / EPR, creating a connected technological infrastructure at the trust level that can also be scaled across geographic regions at the ICS level.

We know that safe and timely performance in healthcare will continue to be a challenge, especially due to COVID-19. To do this, we need to provide NHS teams with the tools they need to work better together and give them access to data that is timely, accessible and easy to understand. Our UK VitalHub group offers a full range of digital tools spanning multiple paths and sectors in health and social care, enabling them to work more effectively as a “bigger” team.

Further information on the available solutions can be found at www.vitalhub.com.

Please note: this is a commercial profile

© 2019. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.

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  VitalHub UK group of companies

  VitalHub UK Group’s leading healthcare technology focused on integrating data into planned and unplanned care to keep the complex simple.

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source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/utilising-digital-technology-to-enable-whole-system-integration-in-healthcare/