CareDirector has successfully gone live – on time – at mental health provider
Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has successfully gone live with a new Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The mental health and learning disability care provider, which has over 3,000 staff serving Leeds and York as well as the north of England, is using Cloud-based Social Care Case Management from CareWorks, a company acquired by Advanced in November 2019. The solution enables clinicians and administrative staff to access live health information to inform the care they deliver to service users.
Remarkably, the system went live – as planned – in the midst of the pandemic when the country was in lockdown. Overnight, it enabled around 1,300 staff to work remotely and effectively from home. With no physical contact allowed, the floorwalkers that had been planned to support the go-live went from a physical service to a virtual one in five days. A 24/7 virtual support desk was created the week before go-live, with ramped up capacity due to reduced floorwalkers. The training programme that was planned to continue through the go-live period also went from physical to virtual in five days, with all training delivered via Teams and Zoom.
Bill Fawcett, Chief Information Officer at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, comments: “CareDirector has helped us to swiftly respond to Covid-19. We have been able to move our staff to working from home in just a few days, build real-time trust-wide dashboards of Covid-19 cases and redeploy staff while ensuring they rapidly have the access to information they would need for their new roles. In addition, we have reduced the revenue costs of the trust’s core clinical records by 25% and integrated the system with four other key systems in the Cloud.”
Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust selected CareDirector based on its reputation for being easier for clinicians to adapt to and use, helping them to make better decisions regarding patient care. The solution ensures all patients’ data can be recorded and accessed in one place, enabling clinicians to make informed decisions faster and with ease. It also provides increased capability to manage workloads and teams through dashboards, charts and mobile working.
Bill continues: “CareDirector is the modern system that we urgently needed. As a Trust, we were an early adopter of EPR but were using an aging system built on out-of-date technology. We had a mobile, agile workforce that was being held back by this technology, and it became increasingly apparent that our people were developing digital literacy skills and the ability to perform an enhanced level of data analysis. This led to our decision to innovate beyond the capability of our old system.
“Our new system from Advanced meets all of these requirements. It will enable the trust to grow and adapt to the challenges of the next 10 years thanks to its strong pedigree of interoperability, mobility and improved user interface. In addition, we now have data-rich interventions which offer a more timely and effective personal care experience for our service users and carers.”
Ric Thompson, Managing Director - Health & Care, at Advanced, concludes: “Our CareDirector solution has enabled a trust to deliver more robust information to a workforce that has been required to work remotely – fast and at scale. It has been fantastic working with Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust on ensuring this system went live on time. The actions of its confident, skilled and dedicated team have delivered a safe transition to a modern EPR system in the midst of a global pandemic – which won’t have been done too many times before.”
