East Cheshire trust and HCS drive forward integrated care solutions
Partnership will improve co-ordination between health and social care services
East Cheshire NHS Trust is to partner with HCS to help drive forward the development of integrated care across Eastern Cheshire’s Health and Social Care system. <.p>
The HCS Care Co-ordination service will provide expert assistance to the trust to support the delivery of integrated care as a key partner in Eastern Cheshire’s Caring Together Programme, which aims to commission and deliver patient-centred joined up, pro-active care services.
Samantha Nicol, Caring Together Programme director at NHS Eastern Cheshire Clinical Commissioning Group, said: "Our aim is for improved care for our local population in all areas - clinical, the care pathway and the experience for patients. In addition, we want to improve the experience for the professional staff delivering that care. Working with HCS provides an opportunity for us to take advantage of a significant amount of expertise and resource that aligns completely with our Caring Together vision and which will help us deliver the success we are looking for."
The HCS Care Co-ordination service will focus specifically on work at East Cheshire NHS Trust aimed at reducing the number of preventable hospital readmissions. This focus will involve project support to help the Trust develop appropriate clinical leadership and governance arrangements, as well as assistance in implementing two HCS Care Co-ordination service modules, Re-admissions Manager and MobileCare. These modules will be enabled by Net.Orange’s clinical operating system (cOS), a real-time cloud-based big data platform, which forms part of the HCS Care Co-ordination solution.
The first module, Re-admissions Manager, will allow the trust to significantly reduce preventable hospital re-admissions by identifying high-risk patients, enhancing the management of discharge planning and supporting more effective transitions of these patients to non-acute care settings. The second module, MobileCare, will support pro-active management of patients across boundaries in all care settings – primary, acute and community – through applications running on hand-held devices that can be used by clinicians, practitioners and members of multi-disciplinary teams both within the acute setting and when visiting patients at home.
With Eastern Cheshire having one of the fastest growing populations of over-65s in the North West, the trust hopes to see a reduction in re-admissions, a reduction in overall hospital admissions, and a reduction in the costs resulting from hospital admissions. It will also benefit from improved compliance with care pathways throughout the patient journey and a significant reduction in the number of patients transitioning to higher severity levels for their chronic conditions.
Martin Walsh, director of HCS, which is the trading arm of HFMA,said, "The project with East Cheshire NHS Trust is an excellent example of how the HCS Care Co-ordination service can not only provide expert assistance to accelerate integrated care, but also provide the necessary technology to sustain improved care co-ordination over the long term."
