OCTOBER 20238In My OpinionBUILDING AND IMPLEMENTING AN EFFECTIVE HEALTHCARE SYSTEMThe successful management of patients undergoing treatment in our health systems relies on making the most appropriate and timely information easily available to those charged with this patient and client care. Increasingly, this function is being fulfilled by the supply of electronic systems, which provide the potential for the utilisation of key data at the point of treatment to facilitate care, prompt clinical intervention and highlight those patients potentially at risk of deterioration.What drives the change?Digital offers functionality, connectivity and information access opportunities and provide the prospect to shape clinical working, whilst also collecting key data to support operational strategy, guide efficiency and the best use of resources. The central goal is achieving improved data collection and reporting is seen as informing the need and use of clinical services, together with data on population health, allowing better planning of services. What do you need to implement?The choices range from a single system environment, best-of-breed comprising multiple specialist systems, but the goal should be for comprehensive systems integration to generate a single source of truth, which is documentation agnostic and reliably available when required. The goal should be for the appropriate display and contextualisation of patient data. This will allow clinicians to have oversight of patients requiring treatment and intervention, and what each individual patient needs to provide the best and most appropriate care. Whatever the solution, this will need to be backed up by a comprehensive and robust infrastructure, to ensure reliable access at the point of care.Where do you start? Key to this will be what we need to achieve, detailed mapping and understanding of the workflows will inform the functions required. The clinical services being provided and operational management of the patient cohort will inform both the clinical metrics required, both for essential care and mandated reporting, and the organisational performance metrics to allow oversight of the effective use of resources and provide information which may be used for billing or commissioning. Detail is key. If there is no in-depth understanding of who we are, what we do and why we are doing it, the system configuration, build and implementation will miss the mark.Simon Noel, Chief Nurse Informatics Officer, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation TrustBySimon Noel
< Page 7 | Page 9 >