Patient flow

Strata Health develops e-referrals for English trust

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, UK -- NHS Buckinghamshire, in south central England, in collaboration with Strata Health UK Ltd., has created an automated fast-track referral form to augment urgent placements into community inpatient facilities. This new functionality will enable quick access to these specific resources, helping to avoid inappropriate acute admission to acute hospitals across the county.

It operates across the existing Strata PathWays Resource Matching and eReferral infrastructure developed by the trust over the past 18 months. This functionality was modeled after a similar implementation in Canada, where a provincial western Canadian client has diverted over 600 acute admissions in the last 12 months to Immediate Transition or IT beds to two of its sub-acute facilities.

Don Schick (pictured), Strata Health CEO, commented, “Acute access is a growing challenge within Canada and the UK, so it’s rewarding to see our team working closely with clients to leverage improved process and automation to avoid inappropriate hospital admissions altogether. Importantly, this initiative also generates robust ongoing analytics, driving active performance management and future strategic planning. Yet another win-win-win for patients, clinicians and the health economy.”

Rachael Corser, Associate Director of Nursing, Medicine, Community and Integrated Care Research and Development commented, “The system must work as a whole. Pressure points in one area are no more or less critical than in other areas. We have worked hard to develop best practice policy to support an automated process of matching and ranking appropriate patients that are inbound towards our community hospital beds.

“However, as system pressures emerge, we must be able to adjust this match/rank criterion. The fast track referral will enable patients that have presented at hospital and require intervention (but need not be admitted to hospital) a swift and prioritized means to locate and access placement to community inpatient facilities.”

Marianne Smith, Clinical and Operational Lead, Community Inpatient Units/Community Hospitals Division of Integrated Care added, “Only by creating a single, unified approach that addresses key operational pressure points, are we able to achieve a consistent application of fair and equitable placements across the whole health economy, whilst gaining insight to trends and patterns of patient needs to better identify future care requirements.”

The Buckinghamshire Resource Matching & eReferral infrastructure continues to look at areas of impact to better knit-together effective communication and operational protocol across various organizational stakeholders within NHS Buckinghamshire Health and The Buckinghamshire County Council.

About Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust is a major provider of community and hospital services in South Central England, providing care to over half a million patients from Buckinghamshire and neighboring counties every year. The trust is responsible for the majority of NHS care in the county, from community health services provided in people’s homes or from one of our many local bases, to acute hospital services at Stoke Mandeville, and Wycombe.

About Strata Health Ltd
Strata Health leverages technology to achieve dramatic patient flow improvement within health systems. Our clients say they’ve entrusted us with the job of creating patient flow solutions that achieve real and dramatic benefits for patients, their families and the world’s devoted front line caregivers. Strata Health LTD is a UK based business and a wholly owned subsidiary of Strata Health Solutions, Inc. It is comprised of professionals with empathy for those who need care and intense respect for those who devote themselves to caring for others. www.stratahealth.com

Posted August 16, 2012