A new dashboard developed by a collaborative of NHS Wales teams is making it quicker and easier for clinicians and laboratory staff to view information about patients in south, west and mid Wales who are waiting for a kidney transplant.
Developed to improve the speed and accuracy of information sharing between health boards, the dashboard gives the Welsh Transplantation and Immunogenetics Laboratory (WTAIL) and other authorised NHS Wales users a regularly updated view of approximately 250 patients on the kidney and pancreas transplant waiting list.
It transforms the previous approach to sharing waiting list information, whereby service users received a monthly report that had the potential to become quickly out of date. Now, data is updated by WTAIL twice a day and made instantly available through the dashboard, giving service users a more accurate overview to support their decision making.
The dashboard also calculates the amount of time since a last blood sample was taken for routine patient monitoring. It then colour codes and filters patient information to let users know whether the next sample is due. In the two months since this has been implemented, the team has seen a 65% reduction in the number of overdue samples, ensuring that more patients have up-to-date laboratory results. This improves the speed and efficiency of the process of checking compatibility when a donor offer is received.
The solution was created using Microsoft 365 products including Power BI and is the result of a successful collaboration between the specialists at WTAIL, the Welsh Blood Service’s digital team, and the NHS Wales Microsoft 365 Centre of Excellence hosted by Digital Health and Care Wales.
Felicity May, Clinical Specialist Histocompatibility & Immunogenetics Digital Lead at WTAIL said: “The Kidney Transplant Dashboard has been a game changer for us – not only for improving the way we manage our potential transplant recipients, but also highlighting the potential for digital solutions to improve our services and patient care.”
Dr James Chess, Consultant Nephrologist in Morriston Hospital, said: “The dashboard allows me to securely view which of my patients are active on the transplant waiting list, their transplant details & whether their tissue typing bloods are due.”
Dr Laszlo Szabo, Consultant Transplant Surgeon in University Hospital of Wales, said: “This dashboard gives us, the transplant team, up-to-date information on our patients waiting for kidney or pancreas transplantation. We can quickly check if we have potential recipients for an organ offer.”
