On the pathway to 18 weeks: Dudley cuts waiting times with Ardentia’s Pathway Manager
In this video case study, senior managers at Dudley Group of Hospitals trust talk about how important it is for their organisation to meet the government’s 18 week waiting time target, and how Ardentia’s Pathway Manager has put them on course to meet it well ahead of the 2008 deadline.
The government has set the NHS a tough new waiting time target. By the end of 2008, no patient should wait more than 18 weeks to start most kinds of treatment after a referral from their GP.
“Our success in delivering the 18 week maximum waiting time target is key to our reputational success as an organisation,” says Paul Assinder, director of finance at Dudley Group of Hospitals trust.
“And I think the Pathway Manager solution puts us in a very strong competitive position to demonstrate to the outside world that we can deliver a sub-18 week wait.
“We expect to achieve the target well in advance of December 2008, which is the national imperative. Indeed, I would expect us to be between three and six months in advance of that.”
Looking forward not back
Business Intelligence specialist Ardentia created Pathway Manager, using a number of Microsoft technologies. It holds information, allows patient pathways to be created, and tracks patients as they move along them.
“We have a prospective look at the waiting times, rather than a retrospective look,” says Isobel Rees, the trust’s assistant director of performance.
“If we decide that outpatient waits should be five weeks, and a patient is drifting into seven weeks, then the analyser will automatically pick that up and advise us that we could have a potential problem before that problem happens.”
Reporting out of the box
John Uttley, deputy director of information at the trust, stresses that it was also important for the new tool to be able to generate reports and returns for the Department of Health.
“There is a standard suite of reporting; 15 reports, straight out of the box, that any trust that implements this gets to use straight off,” he says.
“You bring up the report, click an extract button, and it [the system] produces it in the CSV format necessary to upload it to the DH website. It just makes that so slick and efficient. It’s a no-brainer for us. It’s definitely the solution we wanted.”
Immediate impacts: future plans
Mr Assinder says Pathway Manager has already had an impact. “For MRI scans, we started the year [2007] with a maximum wait of around 20 weeks, and we have reduced that to 11 weeks,” he says. “For CT scans, the equivalent figures are 20 weeks at the start of the year and those are now down to four weeks.”
One reason is that “hidden waits” are being picked up for the first time. “Those hidden waits can be identified and targeted if they are causing a problem along the journey,” says Ms Rees.
Local GPs and patients can also be kept informed. “Patients often go back to their GPs to identify where they are,” says Mr Assinder. “So GP practices having online access to our system, so they can track their patients, is extremely attractive to them.”
Mr Assinder adds that meeting the 18 week waiting time target is only the start. “If we can demonstrate increasing reductions in overall waiting times we think we have a very robust offering to the NHS market place in future years,” he says. “We see this as a key driver of improved business performance and income performance going forward.”
About Ardentia: More information about Ardentia and Pathway Manager are available on Ardentia's website
About Dudley Group of Hospitals trust: Dudley Group of Hospitals trust is the main provider of acute hospital services to the residents of Dudley. View the trust's website at http://www.dgoh.nhs.uk
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Tags: Ardentia, BI, business intelligence, data, Dudley Group of Hospitals trust, GBTV, GP, Pathway Manager, patient pathway, Payment by Results, PbR, video