The integrated care journey - can we do more with less?
June 2010
Almost 400 health and social care professionals took time out over two days to attend the Adastra National Conference in May 2010, and tackle the prevailing ‘more for less agenda’ head on. Jim Chase, Managing Director of Advanced Health & Care, welcomed delegates by highlighting the demographic and financial challenges ahead, the need for integration of patient pathways, sharing of information, visibility through business intelligence and the deployment of operational models and technology to monitor and manage conditions in the community.
Repeating the message that IT is a necessary enabler for scalable and safe care out of the hospital, Jim used examples of how Advanced Health & Care is delivering practical solutions such as iNurse to deliver 12.5% increases in community nursing visits and streamlining public sector back office processes to save money that can be diverted to frontline services.
The keynote speakers went on to address the key issues, including the commissioning of integrated ‘out of hospital’ patient pathways, the use of shared patient records and the organisational quality and service safety requirements. Ashish Dwivedi of Pricewaterhouse Coopers showed how the commissioning of shared, local pathways between PCTs and Local Authorities could deliver integrated care that saves money and improves the patient experience; Dr Simon Collins of MEDOCC recounted his experience of how the Summary Care Record has contributed to improved patient experiences by allowing access
to key patient information in the demanding environment of out-of-hours care; and Dr Peter Kielhmann of NHS Grampian explained how the Emergency Palliative Care Summary has built on the success of the Emergency Care Summary by sharing end-of-life preferences with out-of-hours and other urgent and emergency care clinicians as part of the Living and Dying Well programme in Scotland.
The Adastra development team outlined another year of substantial investment in the Adastra clinical case management solution with specific announcements of new clinical coding, prescribing and medicines management capabilities to assist clinicians plus new generations of reporting and business intelligence tools to deliver greater visibility to service providers and commissioners alike.
The availability of iNurse on Blackberry devices was announced, as was a series of new initiatives on information sharing with other NHS IT systems providers and new referral and capacity management capabilities.
Advanced Health & Care were also delighted to announce ground-breaking deployments of healthcare, screening and wellbeing solutions into pharmacy settings as well as accelerated deployment of the End-of-Life Care Register across many English PCTs and a doubling of Adastra's presence in walk-in and polyclinic settings.
The remaining 48 break-out sessions provided a mixture of presentations by healthcare professionals, partners and members of the Adastra team itself all showing how Advanced Health & Care solutions are delivering real benefits in health and social care, including ‘Polyclinic Interoperability’, ‘Reducing Unscheduled Hospital Admissions’ and ‘Patient Management in Hospices’.
Emma Goddard, Hub Manager at East of England Ambulance NHS Trust said, “It has been exceptionally well structured with a superb mix of information coming through. Hearing about what Adastra are doing and who they are now working with has been great, but getting into the customer experience has been incredible. The most valuable session for me has been the one on NHS Pathways - which is something we may well have to embrace within the Primary Care Centre.”
As the Advanced Computer Software Group continues to go from strength to strength, customers can expect a new format, Advanced Health & Care National Conference in 2011, incorporating technologies for the wider health and social care market.
Kevin Parker, Unscheduled Care Manager at Leicestershire County & Rutland Community Health Services said, “With political and economic changes ahead of all of us, this conference has been an important opportunity to share best practice and equip ourselves in readiness for the future. The session on audit tools in particular was extremely useful for me. I am also enthused to know that Adastra is now part of a bigger group, and to hear about the other arms of that group, because collectively they have even more to offer than before – which can only be good for us at the frontline.”
