Cayder, working closely with the trust, was able to roll out the solution within four weeks of the initial contact meeting.
The Cayder software is being used by more than 200 staff, such as service advisors and clinical leads, at LCHS' 'contact centre'. This takes calls from colleagues across health and social care to proactively manage any referrals that can be treated in the community, helping to reduce the number of hospital admissions.
The software helps LCHS staff quickly access the current location and status of patients under their care, allowing them to make better and more efficient decisions on managing referrals. This supports the trust's challenge in managing one of the largest healthcare communities, an area of 2,350 square miles with a population of 735,000.
Jo Cudmore, business lead for winter management at LCHS said: "Due to the huge geographical area we cover, we wanted to know what capacity we had at each community hospital and in each of our community nursing and therapy teams in real time. Now our teams are able to get information on our inpatients and those in the community (through virtual wards) very quickly on our electronic whiteboards in any of our four hospital sites."
The trust is also using the software to help manage the progress of patients through treatment and then back into the community.
Cudmore continued: "This has led to more efficient communication for us as traditionally it was all done by phone; calling the local team who had to manually find out what was going on and confirming we had the right person in the right place. This technology lets us track our patients in real time, so our teams can communicate electronically, making the process much quicker."
Reflecting on the deployment, Cudmore added: "In our eyes, working with Cayder was a true partnership. They took the time, albeit under tight timescales, to meet with key users to understand everything we were trying to achieve."
Stuart Rankin, managing director of Cayder said: "From our initial discussions, it was clear that LCHS needed a solution which was both bespoke to their needs, yet quick to deploy. Our approach to achieving this was to ensure the project configuration was driven by LCHS' immediate requirements, matching their current processes and making the solution highly scalable for the future.
"Our responsiveness to implement the software within weeks has supported the huge challenges that Lincolnshire had previously faced and will continue to meet any future demands on patient flow management."
About Lincolnshire Community Health Services NHS Trust
Lincolnshire Community Health Services NHS Trust (LCHS) provides community healthcare services for the population of Lincolnshire, one of the largest healthcare communities in the country, covering an area of 2,350 square miles and a population of 723,000.
2,800 staff care for thousands of patients every day including:
- More than 100 patients in a walk in centre daily
- Over 160 patients seen in sexual health centres daily
- 66,000 patients cared for by complex case managers/community teams every year
- 3,550 people cared for in Lincolnshire's community hospital beds annually
- In excess of 100,000 patients access out-of-hours service in a year
About Cayder Patient Flow Manager
Cayder PFM is a software solution that helps care professionals across multiple care settings manage the progress of patients through treatment - from referral to inpatient stay and back into the community - allowing them to deliver better care and more efficient services.
It minimises administration effort for staff admitting, transferring and discharging patients in acute, community and mental health settings, by allowing staff to record patients' progress with just one or two touches on an electronic whiteboard or other device. All staff can see the current location and status of all patients specifically under their care.
Meanwhile, managers can use the same data - which is real-time and accurate - to see the current and historical performance of wards and services ‘at a glance’ and track their organisations' progress against local and national targets.