Southampton buys Amalga for readmissions

Southampton's docks

University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust has become the second in the UK to buy Microsoft’s Amalga readmissions platform.

Milton Keynes was the first to buy the US-developed system in January 2010. Now the Southampton trust is to use it as part of its work to reduce patient readmissions, which director of organisational development, Jane Hayward, told eHealth Insider were a constant problem.

“We do have patients that have been readmitted 25 times in the last year... 9% of our emergency patients have previously been admitted within the 30 days leading up to that readmission.”

She said the trust was hoping to halve that percentage with help from Amalga. The system will pull in raw information, such as demographic data and frequency of admissions, and calculate a risk score for a patient for their likelihood of being readmitted.

Hayward said the information would be given to nurses who specialise in discharge so they could tailor a care pathway to reduce the patient’s likelihood of being readmitted. The plan would also involve input from healthcare staff not based in the hospital, such as community care teams.

Hayward said the trust currently relies on retrospective data about patients who are admitted frequently, but found even that to be ‘troublesome’. The Amalga system should let it take a more ‘prospective’ approach.

The trust is currently in the process of loading three months’ worth of data into the platform and is aiming to give discharge nurses first access to the information in the next couple of months.

Hayward said the trust was initially looking to buy access to Microsoft’s HealthVault personal health record platform when it discovered Amalga.

“It was like a light bulb moment because it [Amalga] was going to solve one of the biggest problems we have,” she said.

The contract also includes access to HealthVault, which the trust is planning to use to give patients direct contact with clinicians via email, as well as developing it as a ‘complete front-end’ for patients.

This would include building health record tools and encouraging patients to add and update their demographic information.

Microsoft’s director of healthcare and life sciences, Mark Smith, said the offer of a combined contract with Amalga and HealthVault was part of an attempt to look at how Microsoft could create a ‘package solution’ for trusts.

Southampton is intended to be the reference site for such a package, which Microsoft will then use as an example for other trusts.

“We are talking to a lot of trusts at the moment and there is a huge amount of interest because it solves a big issue they have,” Smith said.