South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust launches Synopsis

South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has launched Synopsis to enable patients waiting for scheduled operations to complete their pre-operative assessment questionnaires from home or on the move.

South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has launched Synopsis iQ and Synopsis Home for patients having operations at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough and the Friarage Hospital in Northallerton. The James Cook University Hospital alone performs more than 40,000 operations a year.

Michael Applewhaite, regional sales director at Synopsis, said: “Rather than waiting for the patient to arrive at the hospital for their pre-operative assessment only to discover they’re unfit for surgery just a few weeks before their operation is scheduled – or on the day itself – Synopsis Home lets patients submit their health information from home using their smartphone or tablet.

“This means staff can identify any red-flag patients who are at risk of their surgery being cancelled much sooner, and they can then make appropriate healthcare interventions to ensure every operation stands the best possible chance of going ahead as scheduled.

“Synopsis Home integrates with the trust’s patient administration, EPR and theatre scheduling systems, and the pre-operative questionnaire data submitted by each patient is made immediately available to hospital staff.

“Using Synopsis also means that pre-operative care teams can continue to conduct digital pre-operative assessments for patients while working remotely or from home, for example, if they are off work shielding from Covid-19.”

Synopsis will also help reduce unnecessary communication between teams across the trust by making each patient’s pathway visible to all relevant staff via a central digital dashboard that integrates fully with the trust’s PAS and theatre scheduling systems. The Synopsis Decision Engine utilises over 250+ tailored algorithms to generate clear outcomes during a risk assessment to produce a collection of published clinical scores, including ASA, STOP-Bang and P-POSSUM among others. Synopsis iQ also generates a calculated cardiac risk and lung risk levels, and a mortality score.

Accessing this information digitally, the triage team can quickly identify patients at high risk of being unfit for their operation, allowing them to action relevant interventions to reduce the risk of surgeries being cancelled, thus maximising theatre utilisation. Low-risk patients can be swim-laned into an appropriate readiness category and made available for any observations. A searchable database of fit-for-surgery patients also supports hospitals fill any last-minute available theatre slots.

A spokesperson at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: “The Synopsis platform has allowed us to transform our perioperative pathway to a fully electronic platform to further improve each patient’s experience, alongside improved service efficiency.

“It will facilitate a significant reduction in paper trail, instead replacing it with the central digital dashboard linked to our PAS and theatre scheduling systems that contains all relevant patient information, both pre- and post-operation, in one place.”

Currently, more than 30 hospitals across the UK use the Synopsis platform. Its use at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has been recognised as an example of best practice in digital transformation by NHSE in the form of a Blueprint via the FutureNHS platform