With no area of public service immune from the need to make significant cost savings, healthcare organisations need to maximise available resources in order to ensure that more is done with less, and critically, that patient care is not impacted.
Accurate financial management at a Trust and Commissioner level lies at the heart of achieving this. And whilst the old maxim of looking after the pennies holds true, the size of NHS Trust budgets means it is crucial to be able to effectively monitor and report on income and activity.
With our new Service Level Agreement module Trusts can accurately generate income levels from activity volumes, and can forecast future levels to ensure appropriate levels of resource. Commissioners can check charges against what should have been generated by the volumes treated, to be able to forecast likely expenditure.
NHS financials are decidedly complex, with invoices dependent on PbR-based figures and locally negotiated values, and affected by the type of care delivered, whether it is elective or non-elective, inpatient or outpatient, and any associated diagnoses or procedure codes.
Our SLA module should hopefully provide a panacea for financial headaches, simplifying this process by providing a single source of information from which to generate data for invoices and give an indication of whether care is being delivered as planned.
The module is currently being trialled at the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust and the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, where it is being used to support improved management and robust financial control. It will then be rolled out to other Ardentia clients among both Trusts and PCTs.
