North Tees NHS improves efficiency of nurse admissions process

Industry-leading healthcare information systems will make admissions procedure faster and more accurate, enabling nurses to enhance patient care.

InterSystems, an innovative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical data and information challenges, has announced that North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust (NTH) is adding additional functionality to its InterSystems TrakCare EPR to drive efficiencies in its ward admissions processes, while also enhancing patient care.

TrakCare streamlines admission documentation at NTH, allowing nurses to prioritise patient care over paperwork. It ensures up-to-date patient records, minimising the risk of errors associated with manual data entry, and ensuring patient information is reliable and readily accessible to the care team.

The new implementation also delivers improved information access. With TrakCare, nurses can now access patient records and admission details digitally from any location within the hospital. This ensures they have immediate access to critical patient information, enhancing patient safety and care quality. By minimising administrative tasks, TrakCare allows nurses to spend more time with patients, improving patient engagement and outcomes.

InterSystems technology is helping support the hospital’s ambitious initiative to digitise its nurse admissions process. Traditionally, nurse admissions at NTH involved developing a comprehensive 50-page paper document that was meticulously completed for each patient.

The documentation journey extended throughout the patient’s stay, requiring continuous updates and reviews by the nursing staff. This painstaking process often led to challenges in accessing patient information promptly and efficiently. In total, NTH estimates that it was using an average of 33,616 of these documents a year across its 18 in-patient wards (over the period 2018-2021).

To address these challenges, NTH undertook the task of digitising its nurse admissions process, leveraging the power of InterSystems TrakCare. Working closely with InterSystems, the hospitals’ clinical and digital teams collaborated to identify the best approach to convert the paper-based documentation into a seamless digital workflow.

Collaborating closely with InterSystems, the Trust’s clinical and digital teams worked together to create a seamless digital workflow that replicates the familiarity of the paper-based system while offering significant advantages in terms of time savings and accuracy.

With the nursing teams support, the Trust’s digital team ran in-depth training sessions for users. Training a total of 674 nurses and healthcare assistants (HCAs), 80% of the overall workforce in preparation for the project go live. Agency nurses and some social workers were also included in the training to optimise data utilisation.

Jessica Robinson, Digital Programme Implementation Lead, NTH, said: ” The Show & Tell sessions sometimes involved difficult conversations between the digital team understanding what the nurses needed and the nurses’ understanding from a digital perspective the system limitations. Although challenging it was really beneficial to be able to come together in a room and discuss why something does and doesn’t work.”

As the project advances, North Tees and Hartlepool plans to extend similar digitisation efforts to other areas of healthcare delivery, including the intensive care unit (ICU), outpatients, stroke pathways, and more.

Colin Henderson, managing director, UK & Ireland, InterSystems, said: “It has been a privilege to work with the North Tees and Hartlepool Hospital team on this important project which will help drive efficiencies for the nurses at the hospital and also deliver better outcomes for patients. We look forward to continuing to develop this partnership long into the future.”