Creating a Remote Outpatient Assessment Clinic

How the Intouch with Health solution was used to assist in converting a Dorset department store into a remote outpatient assessment clinic.

In April 2021, facing a backlog of more than 110,000 pandemic-delayed outpatient appointments, University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust (UHD) began a ground-breaking project to open a remote outpatient assessment clinic in a department store.

As part of the trust’s innovative and ambitious ‘ThinkBIG’ initiative to help them tackle their backlog of outpatient appointments, clinically-led plans were drawn up to transform what was an empty shop floor into 1,600 square metres of partitioned clinical space, taking the trust’s services into the heart of the community.

The remote outpatient assessment clinic would provide UHD with additional outpatient capacity, helping to increase patient throughput and tackle the trust’s backlog of appointments, whilst also providing the local population with a more convenient access to the trust’s healthcare services.

The Challenge

With waiting lists at 110,000 patients, the clinic would need to take lessons from the Nightingale Hospitals and the Covid-19 vaccination clinics to deliver high-volume, low complexity, face-to-face appointments in a highly efficient manner. UHD identified two key priorities to transform the top floor of a department store into a remote assessment clinic:

Efficient patient flow management
Data integration with the trust’s main systems – both

Patient Administration Systems (PAS) used across the trust’s hospitals to support efficient patient flow and prevent data duplication.

UHD conducts over one million outpatient appointments annually, and is comprised of three hospitals:

Royal Bournemouth Hospital
Poole Hospital
Christchurch Hospital

The Solution

Intouch with Health has supplied digital patient flow solutions to UHD since July 2019. In April 2021, Intouch with Health was invited by UHD to the initial design and scope sessions to help plan the clinic. The floor plan of the facility was drawn at scale on the floor, as teams experimented with the logistics of how to run the clinic, move patients around it, and ensure patient data remained accessible and centralised. Following the design and scope sessions, UHD secured the use of the following solutions for the Dorset Health Village:

Flow Manager
Check-in
Mobile Appointment Manager App

Flow Manager is at the heart of the Intouch Platform and is currently used across 52% of NHS Acute Trusts, processing over 55 million outpatient appointments annually. The centralised dashboard is used by staff at both the Dorset Health Village and UHD hospitals to manage every outpatient appointment journey in real-time. Check-in and the Mobile Appointment Manager App enable patients to check-in on arrival at the clinic.