Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust Reports on Success of 18-Week Referral to Treatment Strategy

PRLog (Press Release) – May 21, 2008 – Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust has reported on the success of its approach to meeting 18-Week Referral to Treatment requirements, which it expects to achieve as early as June, 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.