Complex Discharge – Creating digitally integrated discharge teams across health and care

Liaison Group

A streamlined discharge process has many benefits for staff and patients in health and care organisations.

The challenges

Outdated processes used to coordinate care are inefficient and unsafe.

Coordination across disparate teams is difficult and the ability to join up information digitally across Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) is limited. Tasks are traditionally managed manually without proactive workflows, escalations and prioritisation.

Most health and care teams are still using verbal and paper-based methods to manage their daily tasks. Staff usually update clinical systems only at their shifts’ end, leading to crucial information not being available in real-time, and partially informed and poorly communicated decisions being made.

These inefficient processes have a profound impact on handover, care coordination, workflow, discharge, patient flow and ultimately, patient care and outcomes.

A shared platform

Infinity Health’s digital task management platform, Infinity, removes the reliance on phone calls, bleeps, instant messages, paper notes and spreadsheets that lead to communication delays and slow down the discharge process.

The Infinity platform can be shared between primary, secondary, social and community care. Delivering digital care coordination irrespective of current systems and revolutionising the way a complete Integrated Care System (ICS) works together.

This enables staff to log, share and coordinate their work in real-time so that everyone is aware of the next actions required for a patient and where any bottlenecks are, allowing teams to work more effectively together.

Benefits

• Shares information across any setting, including an ICS
• Releases beds sooner
• Replaces outdated manual methods with more efficient, safer processes
• Improves care coordination
• Allows access to information from any location in real-time
• Delivers a platform fit for purpose

Impact

Infinity Health is supporting the Complex Discharge Team at London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust (LNWH) having replaced an old database and paper lists with a safer, more efficient digital platform.

The team at LNWH looks after approximately 6,000 patients a year, whose circumstances mean that leaving hospital is not straightforward.

This might be because a patient needs to be cared for in a nursing or residential home, is homeless or requires services from the local authority or others. The Complex Discharge Team works closely with organisations outside the trust to ensure that when patients leave hospital, they go to the right place for them.

The platform gives staff real-time information about patients, making it easier to coordinate work and share updates appropriately. This helps the team manage their caseload more effectively, getting patients to where they need to be quickly, and ensuring the trust can continue to provide care for every patient that comes through the door.

London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust’s Interim CIO, Robbie Cline, said: “We are grateful to Infinity Health for this platform, which will help us improve this very challenging and complex part of patients’ journeys from inpatient back to the community. Having a trust-wide view makes it seamless for the service and releases time back to care.”

Infinity Health CEO, Elliott Engers said: “The NHS is seeing more complex patients than ever, so it’s fantastic to see trusts finding and embracing new ways to build capacity and free up beds as efficiently and safely as possible.”

Find out more or request a demo

To learn more about Infinity Health, the Infinity digital platform, our partnership or to request a demo, visit https://liaisongroup.com/infinityhealth/.