Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust and Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust implement the region’s first integrated Care Co-ordination Centre, strengthening collaboration between acute and community care.

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust (MTW) is expanding its capacity to care in collaboration with Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT).

Today, MTW and TeleTracking Technologies announce the expansion of MTW’s patient flow platform into KCHFT’s four community hospitals. This is one of the UK’s first examples of shared operational decision making and strategic capacity planning across a region, and a move to integrated care delivery.

On 24 November 2020, MTW went live with the first phase of its centralised, holistic approach to capacity management, implementing a Care Co-ordination Centre powered by TeleTracking’s integrated healthcare operations platform.

The software provides real-time visibility of the bed status – occupied; pending discharge; clean status; ready to be allocated; allocated – across its two sites, Maidstone Hospital and Tunbridge Wells Hospital.

With real-time visibility of available beds, MTW has significantly improved capacity management, better supporting staff with workflows and delivering operational improvements across the 712-bed organisation. The Trust has increased the number of elective procedures performed each day, reduced patient transfer times by 26 per cent, and given nurses and ward staff more time back to focus on patient care.

MTW and KCHFT recognised that the ability to manage patient flow (the way it moves patients in and out of beds) more effectively, was a model that could easily be extended into Kent’s 80 beds across its community hospitals. By adding further capacity and improving operational efficiency across the integrated health system, MTW and KCHFT are able to increase the number of timely discharges and reduce patients’ length of stay.

With clear evidence that a prolonged length of stay in hospital can adversely affect patient health and outcomes, this integration is yet another important milestone focused on the overall wellbeing of the region’s population.

Nick Sinclair, Director of Central Operations, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, comments: “The expansion of TeleTracking into our community hospitals will provide numerous benefits to patients and the broader healthcare system in Kent. Both MTW and Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust now work from a single source of truth across the system in real time, meaning we can enable closer collaboration and system-wide working to minimise discharge delays and reduce patients’ length of stay in the acute setting, while better supporting our staff and providing patients with a seamless transition into community care.”

In addition to providing real-time visibility of beds across the two acute and four community hospitals, the technology platform allows MTW and KCHFT colleagues to analyse operations, using predictive models to anticipate downstream demand, coordinate patient placement, and adjust resources to changing circumstances in real-time.

In addition, KCHFT is also using TeleTracking Care Progressions to manage patient pathways and make sure patients are eventually discharged to their usual residency safely and at the right time.

Clare Thomas, Community Services Director at KCHFT says: “Working with our MTW colleagues, we can help manage the patient’s journey from an acute hospital to our community hospitals, helping them to receive the right care at the right time with the ultimate goal to be able to discharge them safely back to their own homes. This is an important step to working in a more integrated way across the county, improving the patient experience and allowing us to help more people in our community who need our services in a timely way.”

“MTW’s Care Co-ordination Centre already represents an integrated and sophisticated approach to operational excellence and capacity management, moving away from traditional and manual siloed point solutions. The expansion of this methodology into Kent’s community hospitals is a testament to the leadership at MTW and KCHFT and the power of operational solutions to unlock capacity and improve patient flow across an entire health system.

The vision and the commitment that all stakeholders at a system level have demonstrated is both pioneering and inspirational as the NHS strategically looks to deliver Integrated Care Systems,” says Neil Griffiths, Managing Director, TeleTracking International.