Elective recovery in the East of England

Bedford

Bedford Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will use digital and data solutions to transform their Orthopaedic elective care pathway. They will implement at scale Definition Health’s total surgery platform, Lifebox, and their partnered digital consent platform, Concentric.

Pre-operative assessment clinics are currently a bottleneck within trauma and orthopaedics. Digital preoperative assessment has proven to be very popular with patients in other settings, with over 95% of patients accurately providing remote information to accelerate their care. Face-to-face mechanisms are also available for the remainder to avoid digital exclusion.

The digital tools will provide rehabilitation and health advice to patients on waiting lists, and remote pre-operative assessment. They also allow for digital consent to be performed and the ability to monitor patients' recovery after surgery to prevent re-attendance or admissions.This will benefit patients as it will allow for better informed care planning.

Streamlining these pathways by introducing digital solutions is also expected to reduce the administrative burden on staff, increase capacity, and improve the patient's safety and experience.

Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will develop their use of digital and data solutions to improve their digital patient management platforms.

Currently, the hospital has two digital platforms, mymobility and Painpad, which they use to support patients. These tools provide a digital platform for orthopaedic and pain patients. They have the capacity to create procedure-specific protocols, monitor patient engagement and capture patient reported outcome measures. They also record time-stamped pain scores, activity levels as well as exercise compliance, and help the department provide very personalised care.

However, both platforms are standalone digital solutions that do not currently integrate in the hospital’s electronic patient record system, Cerner. This means that key aspects of the data collected cannot be automatically included in the patient’s record. This includes messages between patient and clinician, or decisions resulting in a change to care plans. Instead, the data is replicated by print and scan, or through manual input into Cerner.

The investment will be used to develop a solution to enable write back of key data from mymobility into Cerner. This will enable data to automatically be pulled through into the patient’s electronic patient record. Patients will benefit from a more effective digital tool and it will lead to an improvement in their care.