New 12-Week Wait Initiative Will Transform Healthcare in Scotland, Believes Ardentia

The new Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting time initiative put forward by the Scottish Government is to transform healthcare in Scotland and radically improve access to care, according to healthcare intelligence specialist Ardentia.

The Scottish Government has released its targets for RTT waiting times, taking the form of a 12-week maximum wait from decision to admit to start of treatment within an overall 18-week referral to treatment limit.

The official objective is for the targets to be in place by the end of 2011. Informally, however, sources within the Scottish government are letting it be known that they expect hospitals to put in place systems to monitor performance against target in the course of 2009, and to be meeting targets well before the official deadline.

Ardentia supports the decision by the Scottish Government to put in place its own targets to further improve the quality of service of the NHS in Scotland. With 19 Trusts already using or implementing its Pathway Manager application to monitor RTT times in both England and Wales, Ardentia is well placed to make available to NHSScotland the information tools it needs to help it achieve its targets.

Ardentia will be working with its partner COA Solutions, already a key supplier of information management systems to all Scottish Local Health Boards, to deliver these tools. Ardentia and COA Solutions intend to launch Pathway Manager, their RTT solution at one or more pilot sites in Scotland and are actively talking to a number of hospitals about collaborating in this way.

Peter Leigh, COA Solutions health sector manager said: “We have many years experience of working with the Local Health Boards in Scotland as well as with the Scottish Government and have built up an enviable track record of delivering highly effective and strategic applications to NHSScotland. We are already collaborating with Ardentia in England on delivering Patient Level Costing as well as RTT applications and look forward to working with them and with pilot sites to help Scottish hospitals meet their targets.”

Gary Luke, Managing Director at Ardentia added: “We are very proud of our Pathway Manager application and I am particularly pleased by the rich functionality the recently released version 2 contains, and even more by the way we have adapted it to meet the needs of clients with different objectives. This kind of experience puts us in a strong position to deliver an effective set of information tools to enable Scotland to meet the timetable of the Scottish NHS, however ambitious it may be.’

With Pathway Manager, staff in the RTT team have a prospective view of waiting times as well as a retrospective view. If a patient begins to drift towards the 12- or 18-week time limit, the Pathway Manager will automatically advise staff there could be a potential problem, allowing staff to resolve the issue within the required time frame and ensure that patients get timely access to care.

19 Trusts in England and Wales are currently running or implementing the Pathway Manager solution for RTT monitoring, each of them applying the appropriate national RTT rules. Another NHS Trust is on the border between England and Wales and has been an excellent testing ground for ensuring that different rules can be applied within the same, single application.

About Ardentia
Stafford based Ardentia employs 55 staff and works exclusively on the delivery of software for healthcare. With over 100 clients in the NHS, it is the largest dedicated supplier of such systems, with customers at all levels of the health service: hospital trusts, Primary Care Trusts, Strategic Health Authorities and national service suppliers such as Connecting for Health. www.ardentia.co.uk

Ardentia
www.ardentia.co.uk

Press Contact
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This release was published on openPR.