Real-Time Clinical Reporting: How Lister Hospital Transformed Critical Care with Medicus

Overcoming Delays in Decision-making and Increased Admin Burden

At Lister Hospital, the ICU and RSU teams were collecting a significant amount of data for the national Case Mix Programme, but the process was slow, manual, and fragmented across different systems and paper notes. Pulling everything together took time the team felt could have been better spent at the bedside or on more critical tasks, and the reliance on submitting data manually to the national registry meant the process was prone to errors.

Since routine data collection demanded so much time and effort, data officers often struggled to keep information up to date and found it difficult to produce timely data for national reports. After sending their data to the national registry, trusts then wait roughly three months before receiving any feedback on quality performance. The feedback offers useful benchmarking but provides little help in guiding real-time clinical decisions or addressing day-to-day service pressures.

Moving forward, the teams needed a more streamlined approach to collecting and reporting on their data. That meant cutting duplication and integrating with existing hospital systems to reduce the manual workload. They also wanted access to insights they could act on in real time, not months later, so they could better support research and quality improvement in response to daily activity.

‍

Implementing Medicus: A Dedicated Platform for Structured Data Capture, Reporting, and Real-Time Analytics

To address these challenges, the trust implemented our Medicus critical care software. The system provided structured data capture with built-in validations aligned with national datasets, while remaining flexible enough to support any local reporting requirements at the same time. It created a dedicated platform that both nurses and data officers could enter data into directly, while integrations with existing hospital systems automatically pulled across key patient details. This meant staff no longer had to waste time duplicating information or manually transcribing details from other systems or paper notes.

Medicus was installed directly on the trust’s server rather than hosted in the cloud, ensuring that all data remained fully within the trust’s ownership and control. This was a significant advantage from an information governance standpoint. The system itself was easy to use, with structured fields and minimal reliance on free text. This not only saved time for staff entering data, but also ensured the information captured was consistent, higher quality, and far easier to analyse.

‍

The Benefit of Built-in Advanced Analytics: Granular Insights for Performance Tracking

Once the trust had overcome the initial challenge of collecting and reporting accurate data, the focus shifted to maximising the value of the information being captured. Mela’s data analysts developed a built-in Analytics module, which took the data stored within Medicus and projected it onto live, interactive dashboards. As soon as information was entered into Medicus, or flowed in automatically from another hospital system, it became available for real-time performance tracking and operational oversight.

The data was easier to visualise and offered far more granular insights. Staff could now explore their data in-depth to identify trends and address issues as they arose. Dashboards were created for every stage of the patient pathway through ICU, and teams could now generate custom reports and presentations within the platform itself.

Throughout the implementation, Mela provided end-to-end support, from installation and integration to ongoing technical help - while the customer success and data teams offered regular training and assisted with any system customisation or quality improvement work.