November 16, 2021
November 16, 2021
The NHS Long Term Plan pledges radical change for people needing planned care. Too often, people travel for hours to a hospital appointment that lasts a few minutes when they could be saved time, cost and stress by the NHS doing things differently.
The Elective Care Transformation Programme is leading transformative change on these and other areas to make sure patients needing planned care see the right person, in the right place, first and every time, and get the best possible outcomes delivered most efficiently and conveniently.
Leveraging the WelLPRES (Wellbeing Person Record Exchange Service) platform – a multi-purpose digital framework for connecting and coordinating care around a patient – Parsek supports some of the critical goals of the Elective Care Transformation Programme in the Lancashire and South Cumbria region (North-West England).
Elective care use cases in Lancashire and South Cumbria
In collaboration with University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, which consists of 6,000 employees and provides care to 350,000 citizens, Parsek aims to help improve access to clinicians and convenience of care services closer to patients’ homes by expanding the WelLPRES platform and validating the following use cases.
Digitally supported Pain questionnaire for efficient chronic pain management
The Pain questionnaire is a tool that captures patient-reported pain and helps quantify the problem of chronic pain and guide decisions about the treatment. Currently, the pain questionnaire is offered to the patient in a paper format just before being seen by a clinician. The management of paper-based questionnaires is time-consuming, error-prone, and has access and sharing limitations as it is not part of the electronic patient record.
By implementing digital support for the questionnaire as a part of the WelLPRES platform, the patients referred to the clinic and eligible to be seen at the clinic can be invited to fill in the questionnaire remotely through the patient application. The Pain questionnaire is a section where patients can express the location and type of the pain by placing appropriately coloured dots on the aching body part. When completing the questionnaire digitally, the response will be published to the Lancashire Person Record Exchange Service (LPRES) to become part of the regional electronic patient record and shared with the clinical care team for further assessment. After reviewing the answered questionnaire, the patient is offered to select the slot and book an appointment.
This implementation corresponds to the need of ensuring patient access to the digital questionnaire which is easy to use and get the most of their engagement. It also helps to improve patient safety and treatment outcomes through a reliable and up-to-date information exchange that is shared with the clinical care teams. On the other hand, healthcare professionals can improve the efficiency of patient management by accessing complete and up-to-date clinical information from the system and using this data to provide a more precise, patient-centred treatment plan.
Secure Clinical Messages enabling communication between patients and care teams in a secure digital environment
The impact of COVID-19 has highlighted the need for supporting conversations remotely with patients, in a safe and secure way, where their vital health information can be shared privately.
However, patients, service users and professionals are concerned about security, confidentiality, and other information governance, which can pose a barrier to the routine and negatively impact clinical workload.
The aim is to embed the service as a part of the existing WelLPRES platform to offer patients an easy-to-use and secure environment where they can get in touch with their care teams remotely in case of any non-urgent health concerns or health-related needs.
The care teams will get a comprehensive overview of all patient-initiated messages divided and filtered into groups and respond to patients’ questions in the dedicated time.
There are many drivers associated with offering patients a secure messaging option as part of the current pathway management platform to stimulate engagement and self-care abilities. Increased uptake of secure messaging improves continuity of care, saves patients and care teams time and protects vital health information in a safe environment while assuring good traceability and time stamp.
»When the patients are feeling well, we don’t want them to be obligated to attend hospitals. We don’t want to disrupt lives and give people the chance to live as normal lives as possible where that can happen.
We’re also looking for a better experience for our clinicians. We’re looking to provide better and more efficient services that are more sustainable in the future. We really want our clinical staff to see only the patients who need to see them and where we can add value to their clinical care.«
Moving further on the journey to more patient-centred and sustainable care services
The overall aim of the Elective Care Transformation Programme is to remove the need for up to a third of outpatient appointments over the next five years, saving patients 30 million trips to the hospital and the NHS more than £1 billion a year in new expenditure. Above all, it will continue to provide patients with a wide choice of options for prompt elective care based on their needs.
After validating the success of these active use cases, Parsek plans to implement additional use cases, such as WelLPRES Inflammatory Bowel Disease Pathway, Endometrial Cancer Pathway, Gynecology General Pathway and other sustainable practices that support improved patient self-management and convenience of services while releasing the workload and capacities of scarce healthcare resources.