Dedalus Q&A – the benefits of Swiftqueue

FEATURE - Industry Innovation Article - Byron Phillips, senior principal healthcare strategy, APAC, Dedalus

What is Dedalus’ pedigree in New Zealand?
While the Dedalus name is only two years old, we have had a presence in New Zealand in excess of 30 years, with one or more of our software solutions in every New Zealand public hospital and many private hospitals.

Those solutions are generally aligned with three care categories:

1. Approximately 60 percent of New Zealand hospitals rely on Dedalus patient administration systems (PAS) for the management of waiting lists, bookings, admissions, management of beds, theatre and emergency visits, discharge and medical record coding and legislative reporting.

2. Our pharmacy management solution is in all but one public hospital. It manages the inventory and dispensing of drugs within the hospital pharmacy.

3. Dedalus medication management helps a doctor order or prescribe the drug/s for a patient and for a nurse or doctor to administer the drug/s safely. It is well documented that electronic medication management significantly reduces error and harm.

What new products does Dedalus have in New Zealand?
While Dedalus has enabled a significant extension to our strategic portfolio and current footprint, both within and outside the hospital, one product that spans both these domains is Swiftqueue, our Enterprise Scheduling solution.

Swiftqueue, enables patients to make their own clinic and outpatient bookings. It supports the growing trend to better engage the patient in their care. Not only does it mean greater satisfaction for the patient and care coordinators, it leads to improved efficiency and capacity.

To have a patient select a time that is convenient for them, and also get reminders, has a positive impact on better appointment attendance. That is imperative in healthcare – we have not got enough capacity to treat the issues, and when people do not turn up that is healthcare time gone forever.

Is Swiftqueue for the hospital setting only or does it cross into other health services?
In addition to more efficient scheduling within the hospital the solution extends to patient engagement and to growing care services within the patient’s home. Beyond the hospital, Swiftqueue may be used for any healthcare organisation seeking better engagement and coordination between the care provider and the patient.

And the system can offer choice – if an appointment is not available at one facility it will offer a nearby alternative, or give you other times, instead of having to wait three months in a paper trail.

Patients choose their preferred mode of communication – hardcopy letter, a phone call, text or email.

With greater engagement between the care provider and the patient, some of our NHS customers have seen an 85 percent reduction in do-not-attends.

Beyond bookings, how does it benefit healthcare operations?
Swiftqueue’s enterprise scheduling platform works across one or many care facilities, for multiple providers. There is also an enterprise electronic referral management dashboard that enables effective pre-triage to post-triage management, from active lists of patients waiting to be scheduled through to patients attending on the day and follow up. Pre-set indicators at each stage ensures delivery of that care. If there are unforeseen situations that a patient cannot attend, there is a list of the right type of patients they can book in at short notice.

As well as a rescheduling and mitigating lost appointments, what are the other benefits?
One of our customers identified that with the implementation of the outpatient scheduling capability of Swiftqueue they've seen five minutes saved in administration time in every single appointment, a considerable benefit when extended across appointments and entire booking teams.

Swiftqueue also offers a domiciliary care module suited to hospital-in-the-home, rehab-in-the-home services aligning with the Te Whatu Ora strategy to bring care close to the home. It is about, “how do we shift hospital load out of the very high-cost high-risk domain of the hospital?”.

The domiciliary care module and intelligent routing aligns beautifully. It includes lone worker protocols with security measures such as pre-configured indicators for care in the community as base capabilities. If I've got a 15-minute appointment with the patient, but I've not checked out of that attendance in 10 minutes, it will escalate to somebody within the organisation to contact them to check everything is okay.

Busy clinicians could see 10, 15 or 50 different people a day. Swiftqueue has intelligent mapping of those clients. If there are any changes during the day, it can help reroute, so we maximise the productivity for the clinician.

And will Swiftqueue be digitally agnostic? Is it tied to a particular cloud provider?
It is designed to integrate with hospital systems – ours or our competitors’. As an example, Swiftqueue is the leading solution for clinical appointment scheduling in the UK and Ireland. In these regions, Swiftqueue integrates to both Dedalus and non-Dedalus solutions across more than 57 trusts.

Swiftqueue is a native AWS [Amazon Web Services] application allowing customers to consume the solution as an Application Managed Service from the Cloud. In a similar way to the recent go-live in New Zealand of our PAS as a Cloud delivered Application Managed Service, customers can enjoy the benefits of Swiftqueue with solution elements such as infrastructure, software upgrades and cyber taken care of by Dedalus.

Brendan Casey, the CEO and co-founder of Swiftqueue Technologies will provide two live webinars about Swiftqueue including a Q & A on December 12 at 12.00pm (NZDT). To register, send an email to info.anz@dedalus.com

If you would like to provide feedback on the above feature article please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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