RealTime takes on risk of reducing stays

RealTime Health and Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have signed a risk-sharing contract for the company's patient flow system.  

The contract includes terms that link payments to the trust achieving a minimum 10% sustained reduction in the average patient length of stay over a six month period.

Jim Gabriel, chief executive of RealTime Health, said: “We are delighted to be working with [Heatherwood and Wexham Park] in this way.

"This is our second risk-share length of stay reduction project in the UK and the performance target that we have committed to is significant.

"These projects get everybody aligned and working together in the same direction. As suppliers we enjoy having ‘skin in the game’.”

The RealTime Health solution combines a process change methodology based on clinical use cases from North American and UK hospitals with a real time patient flow software system.

This will integrate with Heatherwood and Wexham Park's clinical and administrative systems, avoiding duplicate entry, and provide information to the team involved in each patient’s treatment and discharge from hospital.

The trust will also deploy the recently released RealTime Emergency Department patient flow module.

Other recent RealTime deployments include rollouts at North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust and North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust.