UCL plans patient tracking IT

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The University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) is using a business process management (BPM) project to track the delivery of clinical services to patients.

The implementation of this strategic IT project will allow UCLH - one of the largest National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK - to track every patient in support of attaining its 18-week Referral to Treatment (RTT) target. The RTT is a government-mandated target, which aims to have all patients' treatment started within 18 weeks of referral from a GP by December 2008.

UCLH has contracted systems integrator, LogicaCMG to implement BPM software from specialist vendor Lombardi to identify individual patients who are in danger of missing this target and redirect clinical resources to ensure services are delivered on time.

James Thomas, ICT director at UCLH said the new system being launched this week is all about improving the care and treatment of patients.

"The solution will not only enable UCLH to better manage its clinical pathways and resources but will also improve the patient experience by reducing uncertainty in the scheduling of treatments and by ensuring that clinical interventions are undertaken quickly, thus reducing the length of time to treatment," he said.

The BPM software will draw on existing information from UCLH's wide ranging Clinical Data Repository (CDR) and other systems to provide the tracking capabilities in real, or near real, time.

The system has been designed to provide UCLH with the information it needs to model and redesign its clinical and operational processes to eliminate bottlenecks. The results will be used to identify and exploit best practice and, where appropriate, consolidate common activities to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness, while improving the patient experience.

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