Improving Services at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust
Improving Services and Saving Money with Skype
All around England, the NHS and local councils are coming together with other local organisations to find innovative new ways to provide better care for citizens through sustainability and transformation plans (STPs). Although it’s a national scheme, each of the 44 plans is place-based and built around the needs of the local populations.
For Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, their first step in that transformational journey was thousands of miles long – literally. To provide the 60+ services to 300,000 patients across its many locations in the STP footprint, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust has a team of mobile and peripatetic staff, clinicians and service providers who work across the entire region. Together they were travelling nearly 7 million miles each year to see patients at home and in specialist centres.
In a move to provide these services in a more streamlined and efficient way, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust turned to Microsoft for a mobile working solution. They chose Skype for Business. “What became apparent quite quickly,” says Damian Parkinson, Director of IM&T for the Trust, “was the significant savings in travel time and the mileage reimbursement costs. But what we also found was that by not having to drive somewhere, it freed up more productive time for our service providers.” In its first year, Parkinson says, the Trust saved over £500,000 in travel expenses and estimates more than £1.5M in savings for the third year of the programme. For many, this money and time saved would have been enough of a business benefit; for Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust this was just a first step.
New models for team collaboration
Once the Trust saw how convenient it was for their mobile teams to use Skype for Business, it identified several new use cases to further their digital transformation. For instance, a significant challenge faced by clinicians was being able to coordinate care and enable shared decision making about treatment plans during Care Programme Approach (CPA) meetings. These meetings are critical forums where treatment and discharge plans are discussed and agreed between patients, carers, health and social care community-based staff and the ward team. The meetings involve the coordination of many professionals’ diaries, across various teams in multiple locations so even finding a time and location that worked for everyone was quite a challenge. By using Skype for Business for the CPA meetings they are much easier to schedule. Also, it is easier for everyone to attend and contribute, from wherever they are.
Deputy Medical Director and Chief Clinical Information Officer, Dr Chris Linton, regularly uses Skype for Business to coordinate these meetings. “The use of Skype for Business has reduced the delay in convening such meetings as health and social care professionals can join in the CPA from within their own locality,” Dr Linton notes. “This reduced delay results in earlier decisions about treatment for patients and earlier focus on discharge planning.”
Improving patient care and engagement
The Trust is also using Skype for Business to provide better care for patients directly. They’ve begun piloting the use of Skype for Business with their Speech and Language services. If a patient has internet access and a computer or suitable mobile device, a therapist can use video conferencing to interact with and monitor the patient’s status in their own home. Not having to travel or wait in a reception area makes life that much easier for the patient.
Beyond patient convenience, Lancashire Care is also seeing the clinical benefits to health and wellbeing. In their Adult Mental Health Services practice, clinicians have been able to interact with patients and families through the in-patient service in the patient’s home. In some cases, carers have seen clinical behaviours diminish significantly because a patient was either in a familiar environment or didn’t have the added anxiety of travelling and waiting in reception.
Connecting services with the broader community
Building on the success of their team collaboration and patient engagement initiatives with Skype for Business, the Trust is looking beyond just healthcare to connect with teams and services provided by the local authority, joining up care. Whether that means being able to collaborate with social care teams or police and probation, the ability to collaborate and share information will lead to better outcomes for all Lancashire residents.
It’s not an IT project, it’s a business change project
One of the main reasons the Trust has been successful is the approach they have taken introducing Skype for Business. As Parkinson notes when it came to implementation: “We tried to make it not feel like they were adopting technology. We tried to get rid of the reasons why they would say it was hard to change.” Initially, Parkinson says, users viewed the adoption of Skype for Business as an IT project, but with a roll out team that helped to remove the barriers – everything from making it easy to add Skype for Business to meeting requests, to making agile help teams available to work Skype for Business into existing processes that depend on collaboration – users soon began to see it as an important tool that enabled them to improve the way they work, benefiting patients and themselves.
As users become more comfortable with Skype for Business, Parkinson says, they’re much more adept at finding new innovative ways to apply the technology, and it’s clear that the adoption continues to be a success. Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust continues to see month-over-month growth in the use of Skype for Business to enhance normal, everyday communications and continue their journey towards wider digital transformation.
Come join us at the Microsoft UK Healthcare NExT Summit
Find out more about the Virtual Health Experiences on Skype for Business demoed in the webinar with Digital Health and about other recently announced technologies for healthcare in Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT programme.
To hear from industry thought leaders and your NHS colleagues who are helping to shape the future of healthcare through Digital Transformation join us at the Microsoft UK Healthcare NExT Summit on June 7th, 2017 in London.
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