It has been claimed that referral management centres are not an effective way to provide savings and that Trusts would be able to better manage budgets through having more information to hand about referrals, according to a report by the King’s Fund featured on E Health Insider Primary Care.
It was even claimed that quite the opposite of being a beneficial resource, referral management centres could actually increase costs to the NHS, with referrals being misdirected or delayed. Guaranteeing a constant flow of GP referrals across services is vital to Trusts and so having the necessary information to hand on where GP practices are sending patients is of key importance.
Ardentia’s Activity Flow Analytics allows hospitals to not only access information on precisely where their own referrals are coming from – using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology to display these on an easily accessible map, but it also allows them to see where those referrals they miss out on are being sent instead.
This information can be broken down into treatment type, age, gender and location, so Trusts are able to use their resources to the best of their ability to target the areas that offer them the most potential. For example, Activity Flow Analytics may demonstrate that a particular geographic area is sending the vast majority of patients elsewhere or perhaps pathology cases are not as high as other specialties, whatever the data shows, having this level of detail readily accessible allows Trusts to drill down into the findings to look at how they can best target GP practices to increase their referral rates.
