Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

Prof Phil Wood

Is there a particular new development or trend in the space that you want to shed some light on?

One of our major developments is scan for safety, which entails real-time equipment tracking procedures and the opportunity to do that around our patients. The other is data collaboration within the hospital. Moreover, if we have the opportunity, I’d like to do research and innovation leveraging real-world data to inform service innovation.

Could you shed some light on the work that you’re doing when it comes to scouting?

For the past few years, we’ve been working on a project termed Scan for Safety, which has required the usage of barcode and infrared technologies for our inventory management. However, we are also starting to monitor patients through our hospitals to some extent. And it has given us options for real-time inventory management and stock control as well as a large decrease in waste. However, it has also given us the chance to engage in a form of dynamic hospital capacity management, which takes into account patient flow throughout the hospital and areas of demand. As a result, the scan for safety project has been implemented in the majority of the hospitals in the area which we hope will be especially helpful for patients who might transfer between hospitals. We are thrilled about the kind of role that will provide us the opportunity to adapt our understanding of what is occurring in our hospital at any given time.

"We are thrilled about the kind of role that will provide us the opportunity to adapt our understanding of what is occurring in our hospital at any given time."

Could you please provide more information on the collaboration aspect that you mentioned?

Data collaboration is another development which is a collection of health data that can be viewed in hospital across hospital and primary care. Additionally, we have begun collaborating with our local government partners to include social care in that data set to provide holistic health and care delivery for the proactive population health management approach. We have been continually examining several integrated health systems and utilizing the potential of our data integration. Since we don’t have a commercial product, this has been driven by our willingness to share data and the fact that we initially created our own in-house electronic patient record. It has given us considerably more flexibility in terms of adding those extra data sets or granting access to other system components without having to worry about the budgetary implications.

How do you envision the healthcare industry in the next 12 to 18 months?

As a major healthcare provider, we are eager to investigate data partnerships that would provide us access to a wealth of patient data and the possibilities around the correctly governed types of anonymous data sets that we could produce from that substantial healthcare data set. It allows for some accurate research of the impact of medicines or survival rates of a similar nature.

The expanding usage of those data sets in research projects will be the second area.

Thus, I believe that over the next one to two years, it will become increasingly crucial to be able to handle data and extract something that can be used for proper business management as we start to think about populations with complex medical demands and a variety of long-term diseases.