Healthcare professionals across East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust will receive an upgrade in their patient flow technology, following an agreement with smart healthcare IT provider Alcidion to deploy Miya Flow.
The new system will help busy wards and clinical teams, located across the large integrated healthcare organisation’s acute hospitals and community settings, to ensure streamlined admission, timely care and effective discharge management of patients.
Miya Flow will be configured to provide clinical specialties with bespoke electronic journey boards that show important relevant information at-a-glance, for the patients in their care. This will mean that ward staff, medical staff, dieticians, therapists, pharmacists and a whole range of specialist clinical teams will have easier visibility of what they need to do to ensure patients move forward in their care journey without delays.
Deployment of the system will accompany the go-live of an electronic patient record later this year, as the trust advances its digital transformation journey. The comprehensive display of UK clinical workflow aligned information available in Miya Flow will overlay and integrate bi-directionally with the Cerner Millennium EPR and other trust systems, which include Alcidion’s Miya Observations and Smartpage solutions. The degree of interoperability established will allow clinical teams to launch directly from Miya Flow with patient context into any system they need to access, removing the need for staff to log in and out of multiple systems.
Miya Flow is not the first patient flow system to be used by the trust, which serves four hospitals and 700,000 patients. ExtraMed, which is also provided by Alcidion, has been in place for nearly a decade, and has delivered significant benefits in moving flow related information from paper forms to more accessible digital information. It has also supported digital handover, referrals to specialist teams and provided intelligence around length of stay. The trust will be the first to upgrade from ExtraMed to Miya Flow. It will also have the potential to use the new system to support virtual wards in the community.
Lynette Ousby, UK managing director for Alcidion, said: “As someone who has been born and bred in Lancashire, it is particularly rewarding to see clinical teams at East Lancashire Hospitals being provided with helpful digital tools. Our ethos is that technology should make the right thing to do, the easiest thing to do for healthcare professionals, as they deal with daily pressures, and as they work to address national challenges such as elective recovery.
“Giving staff easier visibility of information is an important part of this objective, and we are proud to be part of the healthcare digital transformation mission in Lancashire, which is very much focussed on enhancing patient care.”
Kate Quirke, CEO for Alcidion, said: “Patient flow has become a central part of immediate focus for digital technology in healthcare as hospitals aim to improve efficiency at a time of huge demand, and as integrated care systems look to flow systems to help support command and control across their footprint. I’m particularly excited to expand our work with East Lancashire NHS Trust and to have the opportunity to help to add additional value to the trust’s systems and digital plans. I look forward to seeing benefits emerge for patients and the people delivering care.”
