Synopsis is delighted to announce its nomination at The Forward Healthcare Awards 2021. Synopsis has been named as a finalist in the Enhancing Care through Technology category in response to how the Synopsis Platform is supporting patient load balancing in efforts to tackle the backlog of elective operations post-pandemic.
Patient load balancing is proving crucial to recommencing elective surgery post-pandemic. Learn how a fully digital pre-operative assessment process that uses a central and standardised approach to pre-operative data gathering is delivering load balancing while contributing to improved clinical decision making based on AI-calculated risk.
During the 12 weeks of the global pandemic at its peak, it is estimated that 28 million scheduled operations across the world were cancelled, with each extra week of disruption leading to a further 2.4million cancelled operations. As a result, hospitals across the globe now face a huge challenge; tackling extensive backlogs of cancelled and rescheduled operations as safely and efficiently as possible.
Patient load balancing to support efforts to tackle the backlog of elective operations
To efficiently, effectively and safely resume with these rescheduled operations, it is crucial that Trusts have the technology in place to balance the patient load across their estate according to capacity, rather than the hospital nearest to the patient being the only option to carry out the operation.
The Synopsis platform – comprised of the Synopsis iQ and Synopsis Home solutions – is supporting hospitals to achieve a more efficient post-pandemic recovery through patient load balancing. But how? Let’s give this some context.
Synopsis is a fully digital pre-operative assessment tool that takes a hybrid approach to pre-operative data gathering and streamlines the pre-operative assessment process. It allows hospital staff to access data from patients who complete a pre-op questionnaire from home (using Synopsis Home) directly alongside data from patients who attend hospital for their pre-op questionnaire (using Synopsis iQ) – all within a single, digital dashboard.
When Synopsis is applied as the standard pre-operative assessment platform across a Trust, patient data can be viewed and accessed in real-time by any hospital within that Trust or group. This standardised approach to data gathering then allows a hospital to accept a patient/s for a scheduled operation who may have been triaged elsewhere, thus allowing hospitals to transfer patients between them based on theatre capacity and availability and significantly improve load balancing.
Algorithms
When a patient attends for their scheduled operation, their safety is paramount – and Synopsis is supporting hospitals to drive down the risks associated with each patient’s individual procedure.
Using AI and tailored algorithms, Synopsis creates tailored risk assessments using data taken from parameters including hospital performance history, surgeon performance history, local population health trends and a patient’s medical history. This also supports the clinical decision-making process ahead of surgery by publishing a collection of clinical scores, including ASA and P-POSSUM, alongside calculated cardiac risk and lung risk levels, and a mortality score.
These scores and risk levels help to provide a summary of each patient’s data, thus helping the triage team to take a ‘bigger picture’ approach regarding associated risk. This data also helps the balancing of workload across wider teams, releasing anaesthetists by providing nurses and health-care assistants with clinical decision support taken from the published risk scores.
We have seen the time spent conducting a pre-assessment in hospital reduce by an average of 20%, increasing to 49% when a patient uses Synopsis Home. Fewer unnecessary hospital visits also save patients time while reducing their carbon footprint. In turn, this frees up staff time to spend with high-risk patients both pre and post-surgery, helping support a reduction in post-surgery re-admissions.
