21.06.17
Daily winter data collection process to be automated by October
A new software will be installed on trust systems across England to automate the collection of daily situation reports (SitReps) in an effort to save around 45 minutes of manual work each day – and over 36,000 man hours every year.
Announced today in a letter to trust chiefs by NHS Improvement’s (NHSI’s) executive director of improvement, Adam Sewell-Jones, the move aims to automatically extract data from all trusts rather than require information teams to manually submit SitReps every day.
It will mirror the successfully trialled system already in place across 40 trusts as part of the NHSI Emergency Care Improvement Programme.
The software is due to be up and running across all trusts by October this year, which is expected to help national organisations identify failures more effectively and provide more tailored help during winter.
As well as collating the winter SitRep data automatically, the system will also be used to populate an ‘emergency care dashboard’ designed to give trusts better insight into how patients are flowing through their emergency departments – thus helping pinpoint potential bottlenecks, implement targeted solutions and reduce delays.
Jim Mackey, chief executive of NHSI, said: “We know that manually uploading data places a large burden on trusts, and we wanted to develop something that reduces that burden, while also providing trusts with something in return.
“This new system, which will be in place for all trusts from October 2017, provides trusts with up-to-date information about patient flow through A&E, to help them identify and make improvements to their systems. It will also help us to provide targeted support to trusts during the winter period.”
The development was taken forward by Beautiful Information, a new organisation set up by the Kent, Surrey and Sussex Academic Health Science Network (AHSN), East Kent Hospital NHS FT and Ashford & St Peter’s NHS FT.
Dr Marc Farr, founder of Beautiful Information Ltd, said the organisation is “excited” to have managed to reduce the burden of reporting on health teams and hopes the system provides staff with more time to develop insight rather than “simply reporting data”.
The move comes as part of a national effort to cut down on excessive red tape and manual working, both of which contribute to unnecessary duplications across the health service – an issue particularly highlighted by the Carter Report.
“In practical terms, this project means auto-populating a web-form which trusts can add data to (for measures that are difficult to record automatically) and overwrite with validated data,” Sewell-Jones wrote in his letter to trusts.
“We aim to give trusts a window of five days for resubmitting data for the previous five days. I would like to reassure you that there will be no penalty for, for example, uploading a number of trolley breaches over the weekend and then appropriately, validating this number on a Monday morning.
“However, after validation we would not expect the four-hour position to change significantly. I reiterate that the automation of reporting is intended to reduce the burden on organisations of manually submitting data.”
The innovative solution has already been praised by prominent health leaders, with Dr Taj Hassan, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, arguing that automated collection of data will save trusts time and help shape an improved emergency care dashboard that will help providers better understand where there may be problems.
The dashboard will provide trusts with data on an array of important issues, including, but not limited to, arrivals (ambulance and non-ambulance), average wait, breaches against the four-hour A&E target, number of breaches admitted, emergency admissions and number of stranded patients.