The patient flow technology across East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust will be upgraded after the trust struck a deal with Alcidion to deploy Miya Flow.

The new system will help wards and clinical teams to ensure streamlined admission, timely care and effective discharge management of patients.

Alcidion’s Miya Flow will be configured to provide clinical specialities with electronic journey boards that display significant relevant information at-a-glance for the patients in their care.

This will allow ward staff, medical staff, dieticians, therapists, pharmacists and a whole range of specialist clinical teams to have easier visibility of what they must do to ensure patients move forward in their care journey without delays.

The roll-out of the system will accompany the go-live of the trust’s Cerner electronic patient record (EPR) later this year. The display of UK clinical workflow information from Miya Flow will overlay and integrate with the Cerner’s Millennium EPR and other trust systems, including Alcidion’s Miya Observations and Smartpage solutions.

The degree of interoperability established will enable clinical teams to launch directly from Miya Flow with patient context into any system they need to access, removing the need for staff to log in and out of multiple systems.

Lynette Ousby, UK managing director at Alcidion, said: “As someone who has been born and bred in Lancashire, it is particularly rewarding to see clinical teams at East Lancashire Hospitals being provided with helpful digital tools.

“Our ethos is that technology should make the right thing to do, the easiest thing to do for healthcare professionals, as they deal with daily pressures, and as they work to address national challenges such as elective recovery.

“Giving staff easier visibility of information is an important part of this objective, and we are proud to be part of the healthcare digital transformation mission in Lancashire, which is very much focussed on enhancing patient care.”

Miya Flow is not the first patient flow system to be used by the trust, as for nearly a decade ExtraMed has been in place. Alcidion Group acquired ExtraMed a year ago in a deal reportedly worth £5.3million, and the system has delivered significant benefits in moving flow related information from paper forms to more accessible digital information.

It has also supported digital handover, referrals to specialist teams and provided intelligence around length of stay. East Lancashire will be the first trust to upgrade from ExtraMed to Miya Flow and will have the potential to use the new system to support virtual wards in the community.

East Lancashire will be following in the footsteps of Hertfordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust, who just recently implemented Alcidion’s Miya Flow, becoming the first NHS community trust to do so.