Christian Lambert and Catherine Cromey
Swansea Bay University Health Board
Double Award Winners:
This project won the Digital and Technology Innovation Award at the Advancing Healthcare Awards Cymru 2025.
This project won the Technology and Digital Impact Award at the MediWales Innovation Awards 2024. A film on the project, produced by MediWales, can be found below:
Background
Following the COVID pandemic, elective surgical waiting lists in Wales have increased dramatically. Managing, supporting and optimising patients whilst they wait has never been more important. This project demonstrates the impact and utility of a new interactive digital platform to monitor patient health and provide customised health support and optimisation.
Aims and Objectives
Working in collaboration with Pro-Mapp Limited, Swansea Bay co-created a customised digital platform allowing patients to self-report their health and well being symptoms whilst they wait for hip and knee replacement surgery. The interactive platform uses intelligent technology to offer customised lifestyle support. It validates the waiting list and triages and prioritises patients with higher health needs to align with Therapy services. It highlights patients who report underlying health conditions requiring optimisation and signposts to appropriate support services. It can also health profile patients to stratify their risk for surgery.
Approach
Outcomes
The OWLi digital platform was launched in March 2023. Over 5000 patients have been on-boarded and benefitted from universal preoperative advice and support. Over 300 patients with a significantly raised body mass index (BMI) have been referred to specialist Prehabilitation weight management services. 200 smokers have been signposted to cessation support. Over 500 patients with pre-existing health conditions have been signposted to engage with their primary and secondary care providers to ensure their comorbidities are optimised and any overdue surveillance blood tests or reviews arranged. Without the platform interaction, these patients would not have sought review or optimisation and would have attended their pre-operative assessment without these comorbidities addressed. 65% of patients were identified as Green and the majority of these were successfully streamed to high volume low complexity sites including private providers.
Impact
Conclusions
Using a digital platform to monitor and support the health needs of patients waiting for surgery has huge potential benefits for planned care pathways in Wales. A digital platform with in-built intelligence to customise support according to need is a highly innovative technology asset. The platform has the ability to engage patients at the point of being listed for their procedure, to start preparing and optimising their health in readiness for their surgery. The pathway team has used health data to streamline pathways and improve the efficient use of resource. OWLi has supported patients to “Wait Well”, actively preparing and becoming engaged in managing and improving their health status in readiness for their procedure.
