News
Dudley Hospitals reports on success of 18-week referral to treatment
strategy
9 June 2008
Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust has reported on the
success of its approach to meeting 18-Week Referral to Treatment
requirements using
business intelligence solutions from Ardentia.
By deploying the Pathway Manager solution, the Trust successfully met
the national March targets of 90% for non-admitted patients and 85% for
admitted patients.
With Pathway Manager, staff in the Referral to Treatment Team have a
prospective view of waiting times rather than a retrospective view. If a
patient begins to drift towards the 18-week time limit, the ‘Pathway
Analyser’ module will automatically advise staff there could be a
potential problem, allowing staff to resolve the issue within the
required time frame and ensure that patients get timely access to care.
A key benefit of the solution is that staff at Dudley can save all
the information they need on a patient’s pathway of care in one data
system so they can easily report on waiting times and risks of breaches
to 18-week regulations without having to go into multiple systems. They
are also able to ensure the Trust is meeting its own internal targets.
The Referral to Treatment module of Pathway Manager, which has been
developed with support from Microsoft, simplifies and streamlines the
management of patient pathways, identifying key event stages and
calculating waiting times.
John Uttley, deputy director of information at Dudley Group of
Hospitals NHS Trust said: “Pathway Manager puts us in a very strong
competitive position to demonstrate that we can deliver a sub-eighteen
week wait. As we have already begun to meet and exceed these targets, we
hope to be named as Early Achievers and gain recognition for the hard
work we have put into meeting December RTT requirements ahead of time.”
Tom Mulhern, chief executive at Ardentia added: “Pathway Manager is
also important because it enables the staff at Dudley to proactively
manage and monitor the patient’s journey through the Trust. It’s very
important to be able to predict a problem as quickly as possible.”
Dudley is continuing to work closely with Ardentia on the next stage
of development, which will support immediate access to reports that
include daily up-to-date information and flag up any difficulties with
patients not meeting 18-week regulations.
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