04/04/08
Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust go live with MAXIMS Patient Journey Management System….

Following the recent publication by the Department of Health on the 19th December 2007, in which Health Minister Ben Bradshaw praised health staff across the Fylde Coast for hitting the 18 week RTT target, 12 months ahead of the national target, Blackpool have gone live with the IMS MAXIMS Patient Management System (PMS).

IMS MAXIMS have been working closely together with Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, to support the ongoing monitoring and management of the patient journey for those patients following an 18 week pathway.

The target was set by the NHS Improvement Plan (June 2004) that by December 2008 no one would wait longer than 18 weeks from GP referral to Consultant led hospital treatment (RTT) and provide flexibility for the Trust to manage Pathways where they exceed the targets.

The Patient Management System (PMS), alongside the hard work that has been carried out by staff across the Trust, who have introduced new ways of working and developed services to be more efficient, has enabled Blackpool to monitor and enhance workflow in order to meet key target indicators.

PMS gathers details of key patient activities including referral, diagnostic, treatment appointments and events into a single view of the patient journey. PMS does this actively in order to provide a view of both historic and future planned events for a patient. This is then overlaid with key target indicators, such as the 18 week target date, to allow early detection and rectification in those cases where:

• Patients that have a future appointment that is beyond the target date and so will cause a breach unless rectified; and
• Patients that do not have a future appointment booked and so may be in need of attention.

Blackpool’s achievement of this ambitious target means that patients will wait no longer than 18 weeks from the time they are referred by their GP to their hospital treatment starting unless they choose to do so or their Clinician agrees with them it is clinically desirable.

The pathways management tools within PMS provide the facility to report across all of Blackpool’s patient data, identifying those patients whose planned journeys will breach any KPI targets, or whose planned journeys are incomplete and need attention to progress them, ensuring they do not breach relevant targets.

Philip Graham, Head of IM&T, said ‘we have aimed to make the Trust the provider of choice and we have proven we have the capacity to achieve this. It was important for us to demonstrate we could meet the 18 week target consistently and IMS understood this goal. By introducing the new technologies available from the MAXIMS suite of products, our needs have been met.’

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