Improve prison healthcare, at lower cost, with Odyssey FirstAssess

Odyssey is now being used to improve healthcare within prisons, supporting high levels of healthcare quality and offering leading clinical decision support.

Healthcare can always be a challenging environment in which to work, yet healthcare in jails often poses even more challenges, including over-exaggerated or fake symptoms. So the ability to provide rapid, safe assessments and advice is essential and Odyssey helps the prison nurses and staff provide exactly that.

Avia Health Informatics wholly owned subsidiary, Plain Healthcare, has developed Odyssey FirstAssess specifically for use in jails and other detention centers to help improve healthcare in challenging environments and drastically reduce the costs of referral (e.g. to hospital emergency departments)

Challenge

Solution

Odyssey has been successfully piloted in a prison environment since April 2009. Working with our clients and senior managers in the service, we have designed further improvements, now available as Odyssey FirstAssess.

In the UK, HM Inspectorate of Prisons reported that:

"The majority of prisons claimed to undertake nurse triage but none had any formal protocols or algorithms in place. There was a general lack of primary mental health provision in many and most were not beginning to meet issues of significant physical, emotional or sexual abuse and the relationship to subsequent offending behavior”.

Odyssey helps corrective institutions meet these and many other health challenges, empowering clinicians to save scarce funding while delivering and reporting better patient outcomes.

The leading UK prison when reviewed against these the Governments standards was Hindley YOI (Young Offenders’ Institute), who achieved a maximum score and have recognized the added value and benefits of Odyssey. They are now looking to lead the way and encourage other prisons to use the same hugely beneficial system.

"Using Odyssey system gives our nurses a clinical decision making tool for assessing our young people's conditions, as well as allowing us to monitor and report on the conditions and any emerging needs of the population.

Assessing this complex group of young people conditions can be a challenging task within a secure environment. Since using Odyssey we as a management team, are confident all the right questions are being asked by nurses and are recorded with accuracy and this gives good evidence of clinical decision making within the Electronic Patient Record (EPR)”
George Dodds, Healthcare Operational Manager, HMYOI Hindley

Plain Healthcare (Avia’s wholly owned subsidiary) has been appointed to a number of Framework Contracts by NHS Connecting for Health on behalf of the wider NHS in its home market of the UK. The four-year Additional Supply Capability and Capacity (ASCC) Framework Contracts are aimed at providing NHS organizations and other NHS-funded establishments with a streamlined route to procure IT systems and services from suppliers who have demonstrated experience in the health sector. Plain Healthcare has been appointed as suppliers to four Service Categories including Prison Health, which is supporting the delivery of existing clinical IT systems and/or providing new clinical IT systems.