Scarborough's RealTime discharge

Scarborough and North Yorkshire NHS Care Trust has become the first in the UK to go-live with a discharge plan and decision support product from RealTime Health.

The trust, which signed the deal in October and began roll-out at the beginning of May, recently completed the deployment.

Jim Gabriel, chief executive of RealTime told E-Health Insider: “This provides a very slick protocol driven system that gives users automatic targets depending on what’s wrong with the patient.

"It provides a number of highly configurable icons, so that all authorised members of staff are able to see the discharge status of the patient, including when they should be discharged or whether they should have been already.

"It also links to other systems to highlight, for example, whether a patient has MRSA."

Gabriel also denied that the product is simply a “new breed” of bed management system, saying it enables nurse led discharge and process improvement and can be used to answer performance related questions that lie below the surface of which beds are occupied by which patients.  

“Most bed management systems are a central process that looks at when beds are full - like a hotel booking system," he says.

“They tend to support those involved in operational management but are little benefit to others such as the chief executive, pharmacists, clinicians and porters. This provides all of them with at a glance information.”

Scarborough did not intend to implement RealTime as a big bang deployement. However, Gabriel said that within the first the system was spreading across the trust with eight wards live in the first few days.

Richard Sunley, chief executive at the trust, said: “No one likes spending time in hospital, and we want to make sure that our patients are treated safely, whilst spending the least amount of days in hospital as possible.

"Reducing the average length of a patient’s stay will also reduce the risk of patients developing healthcare associated infections such as MRSA and C. Difficile. RealTime involves every member of staff in the discharge process.”

The company has also partnered with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to implement the software. The trust has just announced that it will cut more around 700 jobs over the next three years as a result of a funding freeze.

Gabriel added: “Yes, the system is based on efficiency savings and improvement but you have to stand back from that and see that it improves patient care as well.”

Link: RealTime