Aston Hospital Case Study
The Challenge
Aston Healthcare Centre - Outreach Health Workers and Patient Care. Users: Doctors, Clinicians, Midwives, Social Services and Admin Staff.
A new multi-million-pound health centre became the hub for more than 300 outreach staff across Birmingham. This was all about data capture and reporting.
The Trust needed a secure, clinician-friendly platform to coordinate care across teams, standardise records and produce reliable reports for managers and commissioners. A significant challenge was to evidence the work being done that resulted in positive outcomes for patients. Thousands of interventions took place each year and each of these needed to be tracked. There were over a hundred different categories of intervention with these branching into sub categories. The task of reporting on these interventions was considerable often taking staff weeks to collate and it was prone to errors. It was then difficult to query and validate the results.
The new system had to allow large numbers of users to enter interventions quickly and easily and then to enable management to generate reports in minutes. Interventions were delivered at hundreds of locations across the city of Birmingham from health centres to GP surgeries and even schools. All of these had to be tracked as well. The go-live date of 1 April was fixed and non-negotiable.
The Development Process
We spent time on site with managers, clinicians, outreach teams, midwives and admin staff to see real work in context. We mapped patient pathways, agreed the data to capture, and listed the reports commissioners needed. We also defined consent handling and day to day governance so the system would meet NHS expectations from the start.
From those sessions we produced a detailed specification and built concept screens that let staff enter information quickly and consistently. Clickable prototypes covered patient records, referral intake, appointment boards and community visits.
Each intervention was categorised with an outcome so weekly, monthly and annual reports could show what was working and where resources were going.
Security was designed in with role based access, encryption and full audit logs, aligned to Caldicott and NHS policy.
A small pilot cohort used the system in parallel for two weeks, then we scheduled the main rollout outside clinic hours. To keep the launch safe we put active monitoring in place from day one. Read-only access to legacy data remained available for reference during the first few weeks. We supported staff on site and a dedicated help channel handled any issues in minutes.
A clear rollback plan was agreed before going live. None of this was required, but the safety net was there. The system went live ahead of schedule.
Key features
- Central patient and care management for records, referrals and plans across teams
- Appointment and resource scheduling for clinics and community delivery points
- Automated case and referral tracking with alerts so no case is missed
- Data migration and standardisation from multiple legacy sources
- Full audit trail for who did what and when, aligned to Caldicott and NHS policy
- Custom reporting for outcomes, capacity and utilisation
Reporting - Speed and impact
Reports that once took days or weeks now run in seconds and are consistent and audit ready.
By simplifying data capture at source, decision makers could see which interventions were working and reallocate funding. This helped save millions of pounds by directing limited resources where they made the greatest difference.
What We Can Show You
Outcome
The system went live a week ahead of the 1 April deadline, giving staff extra time for training and familiarisation. Early feedback reports faster coordination, fewer missed steps and clearer management insight. Data migrated cleanly and users now work from a single, reliable record across services.
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