This topic of concern across health and social care has been recognised as a challenge and earlier this month NHS published the Recovery Plan for Elective Care. The plan details the targets every area needs to make, including:

• improvements on long waits
• reducing diagnostic waiting times
• delivering faster cancer diagnosis
• improving patient experience.

Areas of collective focus in the proposal are:

• increasing capacity
• splitting out elective and urgent care
• prioritising diagnosis
• offering alternative locations to patients with long waiting times
• ensuring patients are better informed and supported whilst they wait.

Amanda Prichard acknowledged that ‘this won’t happen overnight’ and that we needed to apply ‘the same determination and ‘can do’ spirit we have displayed throughout the pandemic making the best possible use of the investment to accelerate progress’ . Amanda talked about flexible working between teams and smarter use of digital care being at the forefront of this approach and I wanted to highlight how Healthcare Gateway’s current products and services can support this.

We can increase capacity

The plan commits to give clinicians more time to care and one way it aims to do this is to reduce the administrative burden on staff. The Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG) does just this; it allows clinicians and healthcare professionals to view real-time patient data provided by other services and settings involved in a patient’s care. Thanks to MIG technology, this data is seamlessly integrated within existing patient record systems, enabling single-sign on, with no need to navigate new systems.

On average it takes as little as 1.3 seconds to return and present patient data, which is faster than making phone calls to all services involved in a patient’s care. A unique feature of the MIG is the Service Discovery Locator which uses an intelligent look up functionality to identify all patient records available via the MIG meaning clinical staff are presented with all available data feeds at the point of care.  One recent case study highlighting the solutions we provide across Nottinghamshire estimated that the MIG was saving two minutes per consultation and 30 minutes a day for each clinician working at the trust, furthermore these time saving benefits were reflected at the GP surgeries who would previously have handled these enquiries over the phone. Another case study featuring Connecting Care Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire told us how pre-operative assessments used to take around 2.5 hours per person and now take under a minute because real-time details pulled through the MIG are being used to support this process.