Cambio achieves major milestone at Lincolnshire STP

Dashboards now employing live ambulance data

20 March 2019 – Cambio’s ground-breaking dashboard project at Lincolnshire Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) is now using live ambulance service data to give an accurate picture of county-wide demand on NHS acute services and beyond.

In what is seen as a major project milestone, the live data feed from East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EMAS) gives instant updates of ambulance crews arriving at the Lincolnshire A&E departments. This helps to prepare for sudden spikes in demand.

‘Live ambulance data is a major bonus for our system oversight of operational pressures,’ said Sarah Stringer, urgent care programme manager at Lincolnshire STP. ‘The immediate visibility of surges in demand is invaluable as its gives us precious time to plan appropriately, by moving people and resources if necessary in the wider system. This will help to support both A&E staff and EMAS paramedics with faster ambulance handover times,’ she added. ‘But it also gives us time to assess the repercussions on services downstream and plan accordingly to minimise disruption.’

Meanwhile dashboards are now also being manually populated with key performance data on mental health services from Lincolnshire Partnership Foundation Trust. The STP now has a full picture of activity and demand across Lincolnshire’s NHS landscape.

Under the deal agreed in November 2018, Cambio has delivered a solution based on its Patient Flow Manager (PFM) and dashboard technology from Beautiful Information. Data entered via PFM input screens is forwarded immediately to automatically populate the dashboard and provide a complete breakdown of current demand, capacity, resources and impending problems.

The project is a central plank of Lincolnshire STP’s strategic plan. Called Surge and Escalation, the goal is to coordinate care across Lincolnshire so all commissioners and providers can respond quickly and appropriately to changes in demand and so alleviate pressure on health services. Underpinning this is an enterprise-wide capacity management system to inform decisions and place patients in the most appropriate care setting quickly and efficiently.