Phew’s patient discharge app helps hospitals discharge patients more effectively thanks to innovation funding
In November 2020, as we hit the first winter of lockdown and hospitals buckled further under the weight of patients in need, Phew was awarded a substantial grant from the Sustainable Innovation Fund specifically to support the development of our Patient Discharge Management System (PDMS), allowing a more effective discharge of hospital patients.
As with many other industries, the timing meant that we faced some setbacks, but this year-long project has exceeded expectations and the patient discharge app now successfully integrates with existing patient care systems, including SHREWD and conforms to the industry standard integration model HL7. This means that there is no duplication of work, and each patient needs just a single entry to track their entire medical journey across hospital and community settings, saving busy staff valuable time.
Another part of the PDMS development was to improve its reporting capability, which is a vital part of the discharge process. The reports allow relevant contacts outside the hospital the ability to securely see bed statuses for their patients, whilst protecting patient data. The new state-of-the-art reports now available in the app include historic trend reporting length of stay, super stranded and reasons to reside groupings as defined by NHS England. The development of these reports fulfils requirements within Discharge to Assess, a government policy developed in March 2020 with the intention to support more people to be discharged to their own home. An update to the policy was also implemented during this project which the team effectively adapted to.
In addition, the app is fully customisable to suit each organisation, so users can customise the homepage to feature the reports they need the most.
Matthew Burgess, Managing Director of Phew, explained: “The Innovate project has been an amazing opportunity for us to enhance our patient discharge app and support the wider COVID-19 efforts for our amazing colleagues in the NHS.
“The opportunity to be able to remove some barriers for adoption and to further harness the data we store with both real time and trend reporting has been of great value to users of the system. One of the exciting outcomes of this is opening user minds to the art of the possible with an agile platform.
“I’m really proud of the team and how they were able to incorporate a changing reporting landscape during the project with Discharge to Assess which was updated during our development process.
“Seeing clients take immediately value from the improvements is incredibly rewarding and we’re excited about the future of the product and further game changing functionality and reporting.”
To find out more about Phew’s Patient Discharge Management System or to book a free demo, please email hello@phew.org.uk or telephone 01234 779050.