Our Solutions - eCommunity
Smart and safe caseload, rostering with visit allocations
Background
Developed by QES in partnership with Staffordshire & Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS Trust and based on collaborative work between The Queens Nursing Institute and Stockport NHS Foundation Trust, eCommunity has been ground up designed in the latest mobile, secure technology to meet the needs of managing capacity and allocating safe visits in the community.
As an operational aid to delivering care in the community, eCommunity is the only purpose built tool that highlights safe caseloads, by visualising known capacity and demand, as well as supporting the right skill, right place, right time agenda , enabling patient centred visit allocation with smart route planning, acuity and care continuity prioritisation.
Delivers Safe Caseloads
Gaining visibility and understanding of capacity and demand is for many a task that involves either a few different IT systems or the laying out of several spreadsheets (or both), often the completed task is out of date on by the time it is used. eCommunity delivers a live view of known capacity and demand and rags the ability to safely deliver care in real time. It also allows forecasting weeks in advance to support smart rostering and capacity management and need delivery.
A live view of skill availability is also delivered helping deal with daily fluctuations in capacity and demand by ensuring the right bank or inter-team support is arranged.
Safe and smart visit allocation
Many clinically experienced staff spend hours allocating visits relying on not only multiple sources of information but often detailing visit lists into paper diaries, neither practice being robust or safe. eCommunity smartens up visit allocation by matching need to skills, adding priority and continuity to the criteria; Time spent allocating visits is reduced to just minutes a day. Patient facing staff access their visits via an app, or online, containing all the information they need. Having a single screen containing patients’ needs alongside clinical skill and availability ensures clinicians are not overburdened and patients receive safe care.
Smart Routing
With many services clocking up several million care miles a year it is important to not only reduce the impact of time spent traveling but also the cost per mile too. eCommunity’s smart routing will generate the shortest route to deliver the overall day’s care, this includes the use of public transport for those teams in urban locations. Smart routing can also deliver mileage expense claims giving your community care staff one less admin task to worry about. For those using mobile devices eCommunity’s smart routing can be linked to the sat nav features in their phones or tablets.
Live Operational Dashboards
Having information to hand in a clear and understandable format is key to making informed decisions; eCommunity gives you a view of what’s important when both delivering and planning to deliver care. Ranging from high level capacity and demand information to knowing the location of each of your staff and if they’ve time to complete their designated visits within their shift. Combing the dashboard’s information with reports, all containing live data, will help inform skill gap analyses to drive recruitment as well help create extremely accurate commissioning and business case activity information.
eCommunity supports any service type of delivery in the community where there is a need to match a skill to a visit and managing capacity is key to running a safe and efficient service. With unlimited users, no local software or IT support needed eCommunity is affordable for smaller Reablement services all the way up to large community and district nursing services encompassing multiple teams and disciplines.
Having a combined live view of clinicians’ capacity and patients’ needs ensures the service is safe and agile. Operationally eCommunity not only provides excellent planning and delivery of care but also supports skill gap analysis to drive effective training and recruitment.
Improving Quality of Care
System users have eradicated many processes identified as being at risk, including the use of multiple spreadsheets on shared drives for example.
Senior clinicians are often weighed down in administrative tasks, like visit allocation and coveing shift gaps due to no visibility of capacity and demand; This planning process is reduced to minutes from often several hours with eCommunity. Released time to care is used to support patients and clinicians by highlighting which patients need reassessing, based on number of visits by less skilled colleagues, and highlighting which clinicians are due supervised visits.
Key Features
- Safe rostering based on need
- Smart and rapid visit allocation
- Live geographical view of clinicians capacity
- Mobile access to schedule supporting “starting the day with patients”
- Work off line app for patient visits and visit recording
- Records Safety Thermometer
- Unlimited teams and users
- Purpose built with clinician designed interfaces
- No to minimal training for frontline staff
- No local IT support needed
- In solution reporting with full access to data
eCommunity is a fully hosted solution and available to use via a variety of frameworks.
Safe + Efficient + Affordable = eCommunity
The King’s Fund
In September 2016 The King’s Fund, an independent charity working to improve health and care in England, released a report on “Understanding quality in district nursing services”. Supplementing the report is their Quality Framework; consisting of 9 characteristics of good care the framework is derived from interviews with people receiving district nursing care, their carers and staff.
A piece of work was undertaken to explore how eCommunity resonates with The King’s Fund report. Detailing how the framework’s 9 characteristics can be delivered through eCommunity this complimentary report also includes a gap analysis template to help services focus on improving on quality.
The QES impact review also contains links to The King’s Fund reports.
