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OPTICA

OPTICA (Optimised Patient Tracking & Intelligent Choices Application) is a secure cloud application, built by NECS in collaboration with NHS Trusts and local authorities, which tracks all admitted patients and the tasks relating to their discharge in real-time through their hospital journey.

OPTICA is fully supported by NHS England and is part of the broader Care Co-ordination Solution (CCS) within the Federated Data Platform.

Our offer

OPTICA is fully integrated with hospital electronic patient records and combined with other local health and social care data systems, ensuring that relevant information related to patient discharges is available to clinical teams and leaders, in one place, as a single version of the truth.  

OPTICA drives an efficient, shared way of working for health and social care teams, providing actionable intelligence to help care teams properly plan for timely discharges. It helps to ensure that any avoidable delays leaving hospital are kept to a minimum, that hospital beds aren’t unnecessarily occupied and patients are discharged to the appropriate place of care in a safe and timely manner.

OPTICA enables multi-disciplinary teams to easily understand exactly where discharges from hospital are being avoidably delayed, for how long, why, who is responsible and the missed opportunity cost to the organisation. 

The benefits

  • OPTICA has been proven to help Trusts reduce their average length of stay and minimise avoidable delayed discharges, maximising bed capacity to support patient flow on a sustainable basis
  • OPTICA enables health and social care teams to collaborate about each patient’s discharge arrangements by providing one place to host an agreed, shared record of what needs to be actioned to ensure safe and timely discharges. This ultimately ensures patients are effectively discharged with minimum avoidable delays into the right place of care with the right level of support at the right time
  • OPTICA can be quickly integrated with hospital EPR/PAS systems or via data warehouses so any changes to source systems are automatically reflected in OPTICA.  Integration with other data systems such as social care, CHC and diagnostic data sources is also a significant feature, bringing disparate data sets together in one accessible place for the benefit of multi-disciplinary teams 
  • OPTICA automates the production of the NHSE weekly discharge SitRep 
  • OPTICA puts the spotlight on blockages and provides actionable intelligence through comprehensive patient tracking and an extensive reporting suite which providers users, including leadership teams, with unparalleled visibility of delayed discharges, length of stay, emerging patterns and forecasting of patient flow. OPTICA’s Command Centre can also be integrated quickly into a SCC (System Coordination Centre) 
  • OPTICA saves time during MDT meetings and enables the focus to remain on overdue discharge tasks and agreed actions rather than the sharing of information 
  • OPTICA is integrated with the national Capacity Tracker to help discharge teams quickly find vacancies in care homes, community rehab and hospices 
  • OPTICA is integrated with the national Capacity Planning and Monitoring System (CPMS) to help discharge teams quickly identify vacancies in Child and Adolescent Mental Health and LD providers 
  • OPTICA improves information governance by eliminating reliance on the sharing of information via spreadsheets and other paper-based systems. Comprehensive purpose-based access control ensures user access is appropriately restricted 
  • Mobile application enables users to access key functionality remotely via their smartphones   
  • OPTICA can provide ICS level reporting (subject to local data sharing agreements in place with Trusts).

Contact the team

Jonathan Maloney

Programme Director & Head of Digital Solutions

necsu.optica@nhs.net

Case studies

Use of OPTICA in Integrated Single Point of Access (ISPA) NTHFT

Use of OPTICA in Integrated Single Point of Access (ISPA) NTHFT

Challenge The team in the Integrated Single Point of Access (ISPA), known nationally as the Transfer of Care Hub, receives all the referrals from North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and other surrounding hospitals for patients who require ongoing community...

NTHFT Discharge Project

NTHFT Discharge Project

Challenge OPTICA (Optimised Patient Tracking & Intelligent Choices Application) is a secure cloud application, built by NECS in collaboration with health and social care. It tracks all admitted patients and the tasks relating to their discharge in real-time...

OPTICA was developed in collaboration with NTHFT as our incubator site. NTHFT saw a 25% improvement in long length of stay performance within two months of deploying OPTICA and a 12% decrease in long length of stay over 1 year, in comparison with a 41% increase nationally. 

 OPTICA has contributed to the Trust’s performance by giving clear visibility of discharge bottlenecks to the discharge team so they can action/target resources.

Victoria Cardona

Head of Patient Flow Services, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust