On Monday the 4th September 2023 Inform People’s most recent Healthcare solution officially left Beta testing and went live at St Helens Hospital. We are proud to expand our offering within the NHS with PRIME.
Record quickly, review over time & make lasting and meaningful changes
PRIME (its fully expanded name: Positive Results In Monitored Environments) plays a similar role to THRIVE in that it is a time recording tool to keep track of what’s happening, where, and how long it takes. A key focus in design is to keep it as simple as possible to record the data required – with the goal of noticing trends and making informed changes to maximise efficiency in the short and long term. The main difference is that PRIME is designed for usage in multi-use rooms where there may be overlapping procedures in the same space at the same time, for example – cancer treatment chairs in bays within one room.
When procedures overlap there is no ‘empty room turnaround’ as with the single use rooms tracked in THRIVE, and not all bays and chairs may have the same expected turnaround time so although this can be determined, it is not the focus of the data collected.
How it works – daily actions
PRIME data concentrates on collecting an Overview of the following:
- Treatment breakdown
- See which is the most frequently administered treatment
- Cancellation reasons
- Start/Finish of total list times
- Late start reasons
- Chair usage statistics
- See how much time, within expected active usage time, is spent occupied and delivering treatments against when they are locked out of action (planned and unplanned) and inactive between treatments.
- Activity over time, averaged from filtered data to show an expected day’s usage
- Unused time slots
- Chair lock reasons
- Treatment duration change reasons
All of these are collected through the simple PRIME interface through the following actions:
- daily lists to be set up for each room in the hospital
- all expected procedures added to the room’s list and each allocated a chair
- each chair’s stop/start timer is updated as soon as the patient sits down and when they complete their treatment.
All ‘reasons’, such as for cancellations and changes, are collected from drop down lists to make completion as straightforward as possible and reduce time using PRIME. Notes can be added to lists too if any additional information needs to be recorded.
By setting up the platform specifically for your hospital there can be a predefined chair amount and bay size based on your location – this way you know exactly what is and isn’t being utilised – compare the difference if all are unlocked and available to when there are chairs out of use.
Early benefits – start time analytics
One of the early benefits of PRIME has been confirmation of an expected problem with list start times. Due to the length of lists expected to be completed within a day, there is a requirement for staggered staff start times. Due to shift changeovers, this means that there are usually more staff present during the middle of the day and less at the beginning or the end. Due to this, many patients are only booked in for the middle of the day, meaning a treatment taking 3 hours out of an 8 hour list will severely limit the ability to add in any treatments before or after, as it’s likely to be placed in the middle of the day.
By providing this transparency we’re already seeing changes for when patients are being asked to attend at appointment times throughout the day and we’ll be continuing to monitor this using our new Time Period Breakdown graphics.
Two week period in September
Two week period in October
Furthermore, the PRIME module has not been created as a standalone site but rather as an addition to the current THRIVE system. In doing so we are taking a step forward towards a long term goal of being able to provide performance monitoring for multiple different disciplines within any given trust or region, as opposed to just one discipline like endoscopy. As THRIVE has been live since 2019 and has recorded over 350,000 procedures so far, there is now a data set across multiple hospitals that can inform managers to make decisions based on facts. We hope to one day provide performance metrics that can span full pathways or categories across the NHS, such as a cancellation rate statistic for the cancer pathway in its entirety or a utilisation figure for all lists containing a diagnostic procedure at a trust. PRIME’s launch is another positive step in making this a possibility.
If you work in a hospital that could make use of procedure time tracking tools, no matter what your department is, please reach out so we can see how either of our existing products could be tailored to your approach and patient pathway. Call us on +44 (0)161 713 4104 or email us at info@informpeople.com.
