The Coordination Centre Programme at UCLH aims to reduce patient delays and improve operational processes to ensure inpatients receive the best, and most timely, care possible.
UCLH has contracted with an expert in healthcare operations management, TeleTracking Technologies, who provide patient flow and hospital logistics software platform.
This will transform patient flow at our hospitals by providing staff with the technology and processes needed to better manage the admission, discharge and transfer of patients. It will provide real-time visibility of where patients are in the hospital, enable the location of equipment digitally, and highlight those patients ready to be moved from an acute care setting.
The Coordination Centre will support University College Hospital, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Wing and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. Staff in the Coordination Centre will be able to see hospital-wide available bed capacity and status of patients. This will enable improved demand and capacity planning, faster patient placement into beds and enable earlier action to be taken if delays to patient pathways are occurring. It will act in much the same way as an air traffic control function within a busy airport.
Lorraine Walton, operations manager at University College Hospital said: “This means we can reduce delays in patient care and prevent cancellations of procedures at short notice as a result of not being assured that there will be a bed for the patient to move to. Also, by being able to track equipment, we will help ward staff to find what they need to care for patients without delay.”
Dr. Charles House, Interim Medical Director for the Medicine Clinical Board at UCLH, added: “The Coordination Centre Programme will make the jobs of our clinical staff easier to perform, removing the frustrations of working around broken processes and freeing up more time to care for patients, whilst helping automate many of the supporting logistical workflows such as bed cleaning and portering.”
The appointment of TeleTracking as our patient flow partner forms part of UCLH’s digital strategy, which has also seen the appointment of Atos as foundational IT partner and Epic as preferred supplier for our electronic health record system (EHRS).
The Coordination Centre Programme will be implemented in a phased rollout with the first elements to go live in autumn 2017.