Leeds Teaching Hospital digitises patient assessments

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT) has further expanded its use of Aire Logic’s innovative Forms4Health platform, developing a more efficient way to capture patients’ pre-operative assessment data, and supporting the Trust in the recommenced programme to increase hospital capacity for planned operations.

Although the original idea has been in the pipeline for a while, the pandemic has seen an acceleration in switching many processes to digital and with NHS waiting lists at a record high, Aire Logic has been happy to support the initiative and make it happen quickly.

The original process would require a patient to attend an outpatient appointment in person at the hospital where they were asked to complete a detailed paper form. A Nurse or Health Care Assistant would then sit with the patient and go through their answers. On average each appointment would take 40 minutes not including the time taken to organise the appointment or the travel for the patient. During the peak of the pandemic the appointments then changed to a Nurse completing the form with the patient over the phone which on average would take a minimum of 60 minutes. The form would then have to be manually transferred into the Electronic Patient Record, PPM+ and then a series of clinical reviews would take place to ensure the data had been captured correctly.

Using the new digital process, the patient now receives a link to the form via an SMS and completes this independently either on their smartphone or device that suits their needs. The new process is being trialled with the Trust’s Theatres & Anaesthetics team, and since starting the trial on 10 May 2021, the team has been receiving most digital forms back within an hour of being sent and nearly all within one day of being sent which is a great indicator of success.

The Trust will be piloting the new process for an 8 week period and expects to see a number of improvements including;

• Reduction in clinician’s time for administrative duties
• Reduction in patient contact onsite at the hospital during the COVID pandemic
• Patient cost and time saving by not needing to come to the hospital to complete the form
• Cost saving on printed documents no longer being needed
• Overall increased efficiency in management of surgery bookings & cancellations

“We believe that the implementation of digital patient assessment forms will make the process more efficient. It will return valuable clinician time to patient care where it is needed the most. In time, it may also allow us to change our process to improve care, for example by focusing more attention on patients who need to be optimised for major surgery.”

Dr Alwyn Kotze, Consultant Anaesthetist - Leeds Teaching Hospitals

Forms4Health is an intuitive, easily integrated, electronic smart forms platform, designed to put an organisation in control of their healthcare IT. Aire Logic believes clinical software needs to reflect the dynamic, varied nature of the healthcare sector, so from the outset, we designed Forms4Health to be responsive, versatile and interoperable.