Ardentia and North East London presented their collaborative approach to the HFMA on 1 October.

Ardentia is currently working with two Mental Health Trusts implementing our costing solutions.

At North East London Foundation Trust, a Service Line Reporting system is due to go live at the end of the current month, as was explained by Finance Manager Don Lyall from the Trust at the HFMA Mental Health PbR conference on 1 October. The system takes financial data from the Trust’s General Ledger and allocates it to service lines defined on the basis of patient pathways; it then compares the finance data with activity data extracted from the Trust’s RiO Patient Administration System. This allows the Trust to see how it is performing in terms both of volumes of cases treated and the financial implications of that treatment. Financial analysis covers both cost and income, the latter by the assignment of known values from LDPs to individual patients and the allocation of the rest on a basis chosen by the Trust.

Hampshire Partnership Trust is about to start implementing the same system.

A Step to Patient Level Costing

As was pointed out at the HFMA Conference, the approach being taken to Service Line Reporting is such that it can be rapidly extended down to patient level later. The Ardentia view is that Service Line Reporting is a good first step, but all it can reveal is where problems are arising in a Trust; Patient Level Costing can show what treatments or patient types are at the source of the problem. Both North East London and Hampshire have options on proceeding to Patient Level Costing in a subsequent phase of the project.

In addition, Ardentia is actively pursuing the extension of its Mental Health System to handle Clustering and ultimately Payment by Results. North East London are jointly working with Ardentia to design the screens necessary to capture Cluster information, and the data handling functions to ensure that healthcare events and, more importantly, the pathways on which they lie, are associated with the correct Clusters over the correct period.

HealthWare data warehouse solution will enable Trust to manage Referral to Treatment Time monitoring, Service Level Agreements and Key Performance Indicators from a single interface.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust has ordered a healthcare intelligence system from Ardentia to provide staff and commissioners with key information to effectively manage healthcare provision.

Based on Ardentia’s HealthWare data warehouse, the customised system provides a single repository for all data resources, and will enable the Trust to manage Referral to Treatment Time monitoring, Service Level Agreements -including Payment by Result Tariff calculation – and Key Performance Indicators.

The solution will provide performance indicators from across the different departments in the Trust, and will be accessed by managers, clinicians, finance staff and information services, to help ensure the Trust meets operational, regulatory and financial requirements and give a detailed picture of how the Trust is performing.

The Trust has taken a site licence for the product, enabling it to roll out the information it provides to an unlimited number of users. This will allow the Trust to provide relevant information to clinicians, service managers and key partner agencies including commissioners and the information service provider Sussex Health Informatics Service.

According to Gary Ferguson, sales manager at Ardentia: “The HealthWare data warehouse is the only solution that brings together information from the highly different areas of financial management and clinical reporting into a single data repository.

“A key advantage of accessing all data from a single system is that everyone is working from the same information. This provides the platform for a more co-ordinated and holistic approach to Trust management, and in turn helps to improve overall levels of healthcare delivery.”

Brighton and Sussex is a major Teaching Trust with sites at Brighton and Haywards Heath. With an annual budget of just under £350 million a year, it provides care to 421,000 outpatients, 81,000 inpatients and 128,000 Accident and Emergency cases a year.

The Healthcare Commission gave the Trust a rating of ‘Excellent’ for quality of services in the year 2007/2008, and in October the Trust announced that it was on target to hit its 18-week wait targets.

Ardentia are attending the HFMA Annual Conference on the 3-5 December at the Hilton London Metropole and would love for you to drop by and say hello to us.

You can find Ardentia on Stand D3.

More details about the event can be found here on the HFMA web site.

Legislation put forward by Scottish Government will radically improve access to care and transform the NHS in Scotland, according to healthcare intelligence specialist.

The new Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting time initiative put forward by the Scottish Government is to transform healthcare in Scotland and radically improve access to care, according to healthcare intelligence specialist Ardentia.

The Scottish Government has released its targets for RTT waiting times, taking the form of a 12-week maximum wait from decision to admit to start of treatment within an overall 18-week referral to treatment limit.

The official objective is for the targets to be in place by the end of 2011. Informally, however, sources within the Scottish government are letting it be known that they expect hospitals to put in place systems to monitor performance against target in the course of 2009, and to be meeting targets well before the official deadline.

Ardentia supports the decision by the Scottish Government to put in place its own targets to further improve the quality of service of the NHS in Scotland. With 19 Trusts already using or implementing its Pathway Manager application to monitor RTT times in both England and Wales, Ardentia is well placed to make available to NHSScotland the information tools it needs to help it achieve its targets.

Ardentia will be working with its partner COA Solutions, already a key supplier of information management systems to all Scottish Local Health Boards, to deliver these tools. Ardentia and COA Solutions intend to launch Pathway Manager, their RTT solution at one or more pilot sites in Scotland and are actively talking to a number of hospitals about collaborating in this way.

Peter Leigh, COA Solutions health sector manager said: “We have many years experience of working with the Local Health Boards in Scotland as well as with the Scottish Government and have built up an enviable track record of delivering highly effective and strategic applications to NHSScotland. We are already collaborating with Ardentia in England on delivering Patient Level Costing as well as RTT applications and look forward to working with them and with pilot sites to help Scottish hospitals meet their targets.”

Gary Luke, Managing Director at Ardentia added: “We are very proud of our Pathway Manager application and I am particularly pleased by the rich functionality the recently released version 2 contains, and even more by the way we have adapted it to meet the needs of clients with different objectives. This kind of experience puts us in a strong position to deliver an effective set of information tools to enable Scotland to meet the timetable of the Scottish NHS, however ambitious it may be.’

With Pathway Manager, staff in the RTT team have a prospective view of waiting times as well as a retrospective view. If a patient begins to drift towards the 12- or 18-week time limit, the Pathway Manager will automatically advise staff there could be a potential problem, allowing staff to resolve the issue within the required time frame and ensure that patients get timely access to care.

19 Trusts in England and Wales are currently running or implementing the Pathway Manager solution for RTT monitoring, each of them applying the appropriate national RTT rules. Another NHS Trust is on the border between England and Wales and has been an excellent testing ground for ensuring that different rules can be applied within the same, single application.

UK business systems provider, COA Solutions, today announces a partnership with Ardentia, a supplier of business intelligence solutions to the healthcare sector. The partnership sees the integration of Ardentia’s patient level costing (PLC) system into COA Solutions’ patient resource management (PRM) and collaborative planning systems, providing managers, clinicians and theatre staff with sophisticated patient-level costing, payment by results (PbR) and planning functionality. This helps to meet Service Line Management needs.

The integration of PLC into COA Solutions’ PRM will ensure that more accurate and valuable information is available to users. Users will be able to drill down to a patient level and determine exactly where and how costs are being incurred.

The integration of PLC into COA Solutions’ Collaborative Planning budgeting and forecasting system, enables users to perform annual and strategic planning, supported by a detailed understanding of current costs and service delivery capacity.

Peter Leigh, Health Sector Manager from COA Solutions, says, “This partnership provides a complete Service Line Management solution, enabling NHS Trusts and other healthcare organisations to meet their service line profitability, patient level costing and service line planning requirements. Managers and clinical staff can now quickly and easily cost individual patient pathways and are provided with a detailed understanding of patient activity, costs, income and outcomes to help meet the requirements of the Darzi report.”

David Beeson, Director of Marketing and Product from Ardentia, says, “With cost analysis and reporting becoming increasingly crucial for NHS Trusts, this partnership is vital as it provides managers and clinicians with the necessary patient level data in high cost areas such as theatres and ICU. It also enables analysis of existing and expected patient-level expenditure meaning that any overspending can be quickly and easily recognised and tackled.”