Nottinghamshire County Council - Case Study
Nottinghamshire County Council and local healthcare trusts now get the same up-to-date view of patient progress and history, making referrals both quicker and safer.
Introduction
Since July 2020, our Discharge to Assess solution has been helping to reduce delays in the transfer of care. It digitises and streamlines the end-to-end process by creating event-driven data flows, enabling a safe hospital discharge when social care is required.
Powered by Conexes, our cloud-based interoperability platform, Discharge to Assess sends electronic referrals from hospitals securely to Mosaic, our leading social care case management system.
How we helped
Staff at the Council have an up-to-date view of patient progress and history, making the referral process both quicker and safer, as there is less room for error or missing information. Having all the correct information in one place saves staff time and allows patients to be discharged sooner into social care support, where needed.
All updates are stored in one easy-to-access form, giving social workers a consistent and simple method of checking for updates. Hospitals can also send real-time updates to Mosaic.
The digital referral is linked to the hospital’s electronic patient record (EPR), so social care teams are notified of changes instantly, such as the patient’s ward location, medically fit status, and the predicted discharge date.
This digital referral has resulted in significant efficiency savings in Nottinghamshire, with less duplication of data entry.
The digitisation of the entire referral process across all the main hospital trusts in the county has transformed how around 10,000 hospital discharges a year are managed by the local authority for patients, front line staff and senior managers across organisations.
Nottinghamshire County Council has been a trailblazer in developing a solution that enables social care staff to view a person’s up-to-date health information, saving time and enabling them to be discharged more quickly and safely from the hospital. This has not only benefited our staff but has also helped to free up hospital beds and ensure people are supported in returning to independence in the right environment.
The result
- The referral process is quicker, saves staff time and means patients can be discharged sooner into social care.
- Over 1,000 admin hours saved per year across multiple organisations.
- The integration brought consistency to different processes across three acute hospitals.
- All updates are stored in one easy-to-access Mosaic form.
- Once the digital referral is sent, and the patient information is linked to the hospital’s EPR so social care teams are notified of changes instantly. This means the social workers are looking at the same information as to their colleagues in the hospital.
- All information is now stored in Mosaic and fully reportable in automated business reporting dashboards, which were created by Nottinghamshire.
- The patient data in Mosaic also feeds a live case management tracker to allow more efficient monitoring of cases across teams, removing the need for multiple spreadsheets and manual data entry to manage caseloads.
- The average length of time between a patient being medically fit for discharge and being discharged is reduced, from four days to two days on average.
- The patient’s health and wellbeing are improved as they receive the appropriate care in the community or at home much faster.
- Health and social care professionals can prioritise the right patients for discharge when they are safe to leave the hospital, reducing the risk of discharge delays and aiding bed management.
Inspiring others
The Discharge to Assess solution is one component of a wider project established by Nottinghamshire County Council, to improve health and social care integration in the county.
In November 2019, the Council secured funding from NHS Digital, as part of the NHS Pathfinders programme, to scale up and roll out its innovative interoperability solutions to other organisations; we have been working in partnership with the Council to enable this.
