In 2024, NHS North West London Integrated Care Board celebrated a major milestone in our system-wide goal to optimise patient discharge from hospitals. For the first time, colleagues working across Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Hillingdon Council, Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea can access and update a single source of real-time information about each patient’s discharge arrangements, made possible by the Optimised Patient Tracking and Intelligent Choices Application (OPTICA) platform. This session will explore the implementation and impact of OPTICA.

OPTICA is a secure, cloud-based application and part of the broader Care Coordination Solution within the NHS Federated Data Platform. It tracks all admitted patients and tasks related to their discharge in real time, enabling greater visibility, understanding and collaboration around what needs to be actioned to ensure safe and timely discharges. Early reports highlight marked reductions in the volume of email (circa 40 per cent) and phone communications. Meetings have been streamlined and miscommunication substantially reduced. Initial data suggests that the cohort with inpatients stays of seven-to-14 days are on average being discharged one day faster than previously.