Warrington health trusts select HCS and Net.Orange to help deliver long-term conditions programme
Warrington CCG and Warrington & Halton NHS Foundation Trust focus on move from reactive, hospital-based care to preventative whole-person approach
Warrington Clinical Commissioning Group and Warrington & Halton NHS Foundation Trust have formed a partnership with HCS, the trading arm of HFMA, to help it deliver protocol-driven care for high-risk patient groups.
As part of a joint and systemwide approach being run across all Warrington service providers by its local commissioner, Warrington Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), the HCS Care Coordination service will work with local community and acute clinical staff to provide expert guidance and advice.
Jason DaCosta, director of IT at the CCG and Warrington & Halton NHS Foundation Trust, explained: "Warrington CCG's Long Term Conditions (LTC) and Frail Elderly Improvement programmes aim to improve services for patients and their carers by shifting from a reactive, hospital-based system of unplanned care to a preventive, anticipatory, whole-person approach. The net result of developing this kind of fully-integrated sustainable model of patient care is to significantly reduce the financial impact of these patients on overall health and social care spend in the area, while allowing us to maintain or improve outcomes and patient experiences.
"Working with HCS and Net.Orange on this project allows us to take advantage of a significant amount of expertise and resource that will help us respond to the joint vision of the CCG, the hospital trust, community-based clinicians, and primary care, and successfully deliver our components of the programme alongside all organisations within the wider health economy."
During the project, the HCS Care Coordination service will:
- Provide support for multi-disciplinary teams developing and deploying evidence-based care pathways
- Provide decision support technology for protocol-driven care across acute and community settings in order to reduce the demand on urgent care
- Provide mobile care applications to deploy checklist-driven, evidence-based care plans
- Stratify the population by risk for community-based case-finding
- Develop and promote patient self-management to support optimal self-care and reduce exacerbations
- Shift the focus of care for clinical teams from 'disease-based' to integrated co-ordination of care for an individual, regardless of how many or which long-term conditions they are living with
The objectives will be achieved by implementing two HCS Care Coordination service modules, Readmission Manager and MobileCare. These modules are enabled by Net.Orange’s clinical operating system (cOS), a real-time cloud-based big data platform, which forms part of the HCS Care Coordination solution.
The first module, Readmission Manager, will allow Warrington and Halton NHS Foundation 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, 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.
Warrington and Halton NHS Foundation Trust expects to benefit from improved compliance with protocol-driven care pathways throughout the patient journey and a significant reduction in the number of patients transitioning to higher severity levels for their long-term conditions.
“The Warrington health economy has been a leader in addressing the population health needs of the community, and the CCG’s contract with HCS to improve outcomes and reduce costs associated with the frail elderly is another example of this commitment,” said Dr Rob Beardall, chief medical officer for Net.Orange. “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with all the stakeholders to enable them to provide more cost-effective, high-quality health services to the community.”
It also hopes to achieve some of the other typical benefits that can result from implementing the two HCS Care Coordination modules together. These include a reduction of more than 30% in readmissions, a reduction of more than 20% in overall hospital admissions, and a reduction of more than 30% in the costs resulting from hospital admissions from the same patient cohort.
Martin Walsh, director of HCS, said: "Delivering integrated services across the health economy is widely recognised as a means to reduce urgent care demand. We are excited about helping to enable protocol-driven care, which provides a big opportunity for local health economies to improve the quality of services and reduce the cost of provision. Our work with the Warrington and Halton health economy aims to improve the delivery of care to those patients in most need of its services, while at the same time providing the support to release urgent care capacity."
- Companies:
- Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Healthcare Financial Management Association HFMA HCS
- Warrington Clinical Commissioning Group
