Microsoft software harnessed by OCSL’s acceSSOnce desktop solution to improve patient care at Luton and Dunstable University NHS Foundation Trust Hospital

Clinicians save 30-45 minutes per day on average through simplified access to patient data.

Luton and DunstableNHS Foundation Trust Hospital has introduced acceSSOnce, an OCSL solution based on Microsoft software to simplify clinical access to multiple applications and patient records, and improve patient care. acceSSOnce provides a clinical desktop solution that is capable of following users across multiple devices, making it easier for clinicians to transfer sessions across devices regardless of their location and creating a ‘follow-me’ user experience. The solution was developed between Microsoft and OCSL, a long term supplier of IT solutions to the healthcare sector.           

Luton and Dunstable Hospital in Bedfordshire houses 700 beds with over 4,000 members of staff. The Hospital was keen to improve the level of care it offered its patients by reducing the amount of time clinicians spent logging on to different applications. It also wanted to create a more agile workforce that could access patient information and provide treatment across multiple locations.

acceSSOnce provides users with one clinical desktop solution that layers over all existing applications. It is capable of working across desktop, laptop and tablet devices and creates a virtual desktop that allows session persistence from the office, to the patients’ bedsides, to the outpatients’ clinic. This makes it easier for clinicians to securely access data while making their rounds, confident that the information they are acting on remains consistent across devices. This mobile device-neutral environment also provides a starting platform for the hospital’s Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) scheme and allows it to push ahead with plans to provide clinicians with tablet devices that can provide the interface via Windows 8 to the clinical teams. 

As well as facilitating this technological step-change to make working with the computing devices easier, acceSSOnce also increases the amount of time that clinicians can spend with patients. By gaining faster access to clinical information, staff can save time on ward rounds and reduce the time to launch applications by 90 per cent. After fully implementing the system Luton and Dunstable NHS Hospital has found that clinicians have saved 30-45 minutes per day on average from multiple password retrieval and securing devices.

Mark England, Director of Information Management and Technology, Luton and Dunstable NHS Hospital, said: “Speaking to staff we found that their biggest frustration was having to enter a password and select the patient for every system. acceSSOnce eliminates this time consuming process and makes it much simpler to securely access information when moving around the hospital. This improves the lives of our clinicians and increases the amount of time they can spend treating patients and providing care. On top of this we can take a stronger line with regard to information security and governance as we now have a much improved audit trail on access to our applications. acceSSOnce has revolutionised how we look at results. Instead of logging onto different systems, we log in once and look at all of the results in one go, saving us time and making us more efficient. Any additional time saved by being able to manage patients more efficiently means we’ll have more time to ensure we’re discharging our patients safely.”

Jane Ayres, Director of OCSL, said: “As Luton and Dunstable has shown, acceSSOnce can have a significant impact on the lives of clinicians. Forty-five minutes a day could translate to three additional patient visits. Over the course of a year, that means one clinician could treat roughly 800 more patients. Multiply that across the hospital’s entire clinical staff and that number grows exponentially again. At a time when budgets are being continually squeezed, acceSSOnce offers a simple way to improve productivity and patient care, by alleviating the administrational burden of those on the frontline.”

Please take a look at this video to see the benefits for Luton and Dunstable NHS Foundation Trust Hospital from implementing acceSSOnce, the Clinical Desktop Solution from OCSL...