Author: Owen Hughes
In an effort to reduce preoperative consultation times, East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust has introduced a population health platform.
The trust implemented a digital dashboard from Graphnet Health in March 2024 to automate risk stratification and triage for day patients awaiting preoperative assessment.
This dashboard integrates surgical waiting list data with patient-level primary care records, enabling hospital teams to identify high and low-risk patients awaiting surgery.
Dr. Simon Rang, lead for perioperative medicine at East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust, reported positive results, including time savings that allow for more patients to be seen and resources to be allocated for additional triage and complex cases.
The platform’s digital risk stratification tool also helped improve productivity by scheduling high-risk patients for appointments with nurses and consultants, resulting in a 27% reduction in consultation times for surgical day cases during a pilot from April to May 2024.
Despite some manual revisions due to incomplete patient information, the platform successfully triaged 77% of patients awaiting day-case surgery, cutting average consultation times from 30 to 22 minutes.
East Kent Hospitals plans to expand the platform’s use for medical screening and triage of all patients referred to the pre-surgical preparation service, aiming to address health inequalities by collaborating with Kent Community Health Foundation Trust to identify patients who would benefit from community-based health promotion services while awaiting surgery.
In a similar effort to streamline surgical pathways and tackle waiting lists, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust combined its surgical waiting lists with the Buckinghamshire Shared Care Record in October 2023.
