Improving patient flow in the Emergency Department through portering

Infinity Health is a digital platform for health and care staff to plan, coordinate, and manage their workloads.

It is used in hospitals and in the community to replace inefficient and unsafe methods of planning and coordination, like paper, phone calls, and bleeps.

Carrie Johnson, Senior Sister, London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust.

Millions of porter requests are coordinated every year in the Emergency Department (ED), but delays in transferring patients to investigations or ongoing care impacts patients awaiting admission.

London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust (LNWH) commissioned a pilot of the Infinity platform to replace the manual, paper-based process for making porter requests at Northwick Park Hospital. This meant staff could submit requests from anywhere in the hospital, using secure mobile devices, and porters could accept and share their activity in real-time.

The partnership has since expanded to other departments and sites at LNWH and Infinity has helped coordinate in excess of 650,000 porter requests. Infinity was used for clinical task management in the short-term assessment, rehabilitation and reablement service (STARRS) which supports patients to receive treatment at home or be discharged sooner from hospital. This project helped to increase service capacity by approximately 55%, without increasing the number of staff.

As a result of the project, the team won an HSJ award for ‘Driving efficiency through technology’. The team has also now gathered evaluation data and user feedback to help them to refine the solution and their priorities, which are now more in line with NHS England priorities.

At the time of writing, Infinity was also being used in six other NHS Trusts to fulfil a range of objectives including saving 91 minutes per user per shift in out-of-hours at Somerset Foundation Trust, COVID-19 lateral flow testing monitoring for more than 15% of frontline NHS staff, and digitising Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU) at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.

Adoption and spread or improvement methodology

The Infinity team’s time on the Accelerator allowed them to receive advice sessions from health economists at ICHP, which helped the company build its knowledge around evaluation. The opportunity at LNWH enabled Infinity Health to design an evaluation to demonstrate their impact on hospital efficiency, safety, and staff experience.

They have also taken part in other Accelerators, including the NHS Innovation Accelerator which helped them to connect with other fellows and share knowledge and expertise. It also put them at the table when NHS England wanted to identify companies that could support elective recovery, which has since led to a pilot at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and thousands of patients benefitting from automating and optimising patient initiative follow up (PIFU).

They were also selected for the AWS Accelerator, that supported them through networking, workshops, and mentoring to refine their focus and positioning.

Infinity’s hospital portering solution replaced the manual, paper-based process at LNWH into a truly digital, ‘just in time’ service.

More than 1,200 staff at the trust now use Infinity to make over 220,000 portering requests each year, and the cancellation rate has reduced by over 80%. The performance of the emergency department has significant consequences for the operational efficiency of the entire hospital, so this impact is considerable.

Using Infinity means that no task is missed, which provides a better experience for porters and clinicians, as they are all working from the same platform.

It has saved six minutes per porter request, which in the first year equated to 10,000 hours saved – the equivalent to five full-time members of staff.

Porters now know who requested the transfer, the patient’s name and any additional requirements, meaning that patients experience a far more streamlined and coordinated service.