The ability to control patient encounters has a significant benefit for service providers; whether managing the numbers of encounters or being able to directly refer to a service and provide the patient with accurate data on when they can expect to be dealt with.
The Booking Standard support these, and other related scenarios, for software suppliers to build booking functionality which is interoperable between their systems and, therefore, services.
Benefits
There are two key elements to booking, providing slots and making a booking
Slot Providers
The ability to advertise capacity, offering available slots, to other services helps manage patient contacts and reduce periods of influx. Other services will know when there is capacity and be better informed to direct the “ideal” steady stream of patients to a service. If capacity peaks, Slot Providers can reduce available slots to better manage service resource. If multiple services are run from the same physical building, these can be mapped separately and made available through service discovery tools such as the DoS (Directory of Services).
When a booking is made, the Standard includes sending supporting clinical information, allowing the service provider accepting the booking to have sight of the patient need before they arrive. This avoids service having to start from the beginning again when a patient enters their service, offering a more joined up experience of care for all involved.
Booking Consumers
When it has been identified a patient need to be sent to another service, having the ability to view the capacity of that service and direct the patient there at an appropriate time helps maintain continuity of care. Moreover, the patient is less likely to wait as long to be seen, further supporting better patient experience of the care they receive.
Implementing Booking
Initiating a project
There are numerous stages to enabling booking and the steps will differ depending on whether the Service Provider intends to offer booking availability (Provider) or request bookings (Consumer).
Firstly, the software used by the service must provide booking functionality which adheres to the Booking Standard. A full list of conformant system suppliers can be found under the Supplier Conformance catalogue.
Implementing booking within a service may take one of many routes to arrive at the point of wanting to engage a project. Whatever the path, one of the first things to establish is a project scope and team to support (including stakeholders), the Booking Team (and related resources) will be invaluable to ensuring a successful go live.
This is not an exhaustive plan of the stages of implementation but gives a flavour of some key considerations.
Technical
Integrating systems with each other is always going to present some technical challenges and booking is no exception. There are numerous prerequisites to being able to enable the functionality, listed under the path-to-live section. Suppliers usually dedicate a Project Manager to assist with many of the steps but key roles involved with the service, such as DoS Leads, will need to be engaged as well. If the service is established and using other core spine services, many of the prerequisites are likely to already be met.
One of the principal technical requirements will be the configuration of the supplier software to support the new process of bookings, whether Providing slot capacity or making the bookings themselves.
Process change
Altering or extending a Service’s business processes is often a significant undertaking, involving leads for the Service, DoS, Clinical, Training etc., mapping the scope and implications of the change. The new process will need documenting (Standard Operating Procedure - SOP) and signing off by all key stakeholders.
It is common for a system supplier Consultant to discuss potential workflow and outline options to meet the service need, designing and implement the necessary configuration.
Testing of the implementation and configuration will be undertaken in an isolated setting in the Production environment, following a strictly outlined Test Plan. Once confirmed successful, a plan for Business Go-Live can be agreed, involving training staff, completing the project phase and communicating the new service processes to the Business-as-usual teams.
If you have any questions please contact the Booking team at: bookingandreferrals@nhs.net