Aire Logic's Pragmatic Approach to Technology Support in Leeds
- 08 September 2017
- Posted in: Healthcare, Science & Technology
At Aire Logic, our experience working with the NHS and other health and social care providers has enabled us to understand first-hand the requirements and challenges of true interoperability. However, we believe strongly that to deliver improved outcomes for patients, health and social care professionals need access to information to allow them to complete their roles in care, effectively and efficiently.
To meet this need, Aire Logic has worked with a range of health organisations to deliver an innovative eForms solution, forms4health, which enables unlimited expansion and roll-out of healthcare systems. The solution allows clinicians and subject matter experts to quickly and easily design their own eForms, and share them with colleagues. This accelerates collaboration and agreement on new features, and puts the clinicians back in control of their healthcare IT. Once published into live, forms4health forms are immediately usable on any device, supporting mobile working and increased productivity.
The ease of development and deployment has meant that forms can be amended and improved as clinical experience and usage inform better practices, creating high quality resources shared across entire trusts and regions.
In line with the Five Year Forward View paperless 2020 objective, forms4health’s ability to rapidly transform paper forms into fully functional eForms benefits clinicians and healthcare professionals through standardised data collection, ease of access, and decreased clinical risk (using smart form technology). Inbuilt Clinical Decision Support and clinical tools, such as the National Early Warning Signs calculator, provide guidance and advice as forms are completed, prompting relevant actions based on the patient information. All data captured across the system is readily available for reporting, allowing organisations to analyse care delivery and target areas for improvement.
Our largest eForms implementation, with around 300 systems across a region, is led by Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust. We initially collaborated to deliver an enhanced, integrated EHR for LTHT.
LTHT recognised that ripping and replacing key, well-established systems was time consuming, costly and disruptive. As such they adopted a best of breed strategy with PPM+ as the central component to provide integrated views and single-sign access to these other systems. Another facet of the LTHT strategy was to use an eForms platform as a core module of the PPM+ platform providing data entry for a huge range of clinical scenarios and services.
By integrating PPM+ with healthcare settings across the city, the enhanced EHR became the heart of a new shared care initiative, the Leeds Care Record (LCR). The Leeds Care Record has now expanded into a collaboration involving over 140 organisations. It is used in all 105 GP practices across Leeds, the local mental health trust, Leeds Community Health, Leeds City Council, and Leeds’ two major hospices, ensuring that care records are available wherever an individual engages with the local health and care system.
Across the Trust, PPM+ is utilising the eForms technology to deliver far-reaching improvements in healthcare outcomes. From reducing bed-blocking, to ensuring more personalised, timely patient care, the shared, integrated EHR means information is available at the point of care, and all necessary administration is completed quickly and efficiently.
The project in Leeds has enabled massive cost savings. In 2016-2017, the efficiency benefits from the Leeds Care Record alone were over £3 million. By digitising processes across the Trust, the system not only saves expenses on resources like paper, ink and storage, but saves time for both administrative and clinical staff, and improves efficiencies trust-wide.
Our collaboration with Leeds healthcare providers is expanding in a range of ways, including further work in delivering real-time information to eWhiteboards, working with Community Health, and the CCG to deliver patient facing forms and accelerating digital maturity across the region and beyond.
Since forms4health is such a versatile solution, whatever the care setting, users can recreate any forms currently completed on paper, digitally, allowing their organisation to move towards paperless working, in addition to streamlining workflows and achieving significant financial benefits. With a proven, highly successful, implemented solution, Aire Logic is now keen to broaden its work into other regional areas and help other health and social care organisations deliver improved outcomes for patients, and make the resource efficiencies that have resulted from our work across Leeds.
