Pathway Manager and Patient Level Costing solutions will help Trust to meet 18-week-wait targets and reinforce effective Service Line Reporting.

Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust has ordered healthcare intelligence solutions from Ardentia to help meet required Government reporting targets and further enhance Service Line Reporting to assist in its application to become a Foundation Trust.

The Pathway Manager solution, supplied by business intelligence specialist Ardentia, will replace an existing in-house solution to monitor 18 week-wait pathways. This will enable the Trust to liberate valuable resources, allowing internal staff to focus on improving outcomes and optimising care delivery.

The Trust is also to deploy Ardentia’s Patient Level Information and Costing system (PLICS) to support its Foundation Trust status application. The solution provides effective cost analysis and reporting, offering a sound basis for Service Line Management.

Stuart Tebbutt, senior sales consultant at Ardentia said: “‘I am delighted that Sandwell and West Birmingham has chosen to come to us for its software. The Trust is highly dynamic and innovative in its approach to healthcare, as it demonstrated by opening state-of-the-art facilities at the Birmingham Treatment Centre at the City Hospital site and a new Emergency Services Centre at Sandwell in 2005, to best meet the needs of the 600,000 people it provides care services for.

“The Trust is ideally placed to take full advantage of our Pathway Manager and PLICS solutions and we’ll be continuing to work closely with them to ensure they get the quality of data to meet reporting requirements, and be successful in their bid for foundation status.”

Ardentia’s Pathway Manager manages patient pathways from initial GP contact to acute or other hospital treatment, to ensure compliance with the 18-week wait rules. Powerful functionality supports routine reporting and ad-hoc query reporting at patient, pathway and event level, enabling Trusts to meet national reporting requirements and also to drill down and investigate wider issues relating to patient pathways in greater detail.

Ardentia’s Patient Level Costing solution meets the requirement for cost analysis and reporting on service-line profitability by providing a quick way of costing individual patient records and enabling finance managers to analyse whether care is being delivered within income for each case mix type, supporting more strategic financial management and ensuring the best use of healthcare resources.

Data Warehouse and Patient Level Costing systems will improve processing times and offer a complete solution for all costing and budgeting.

NHS Manchester has deployed Ardentia’s Data Warehouse and Patient Level Costing solutions to replace existing inhouse legacy systems and reduce risk to clinical and PCT data.

The business intelligence solutions have been deployed across Manchester PCT’s commissioning and provisioning functions and will offer a single repository for all data resources, enabling healthcare managers to make quick and informed decisions, and ensure timely patient progress and access to care.

NHS Manchester spends a significant £15 million annually on information services and the Ardentia solution enables practice-based validation by providing relevant staff with access to a secure central website, which ensures controlled management of cost savings. It also supports long-term planning and provides a more thorough understanding of how money is spent to ensure best value.

The Data Warehouse module collates all data from Secondary Uses Services, GP practices and Manchester Community Health, storing the information centrally. By purchasing a system to manage this data, NHS Manchester has minimised the risk of data loss and has also dramatically reduced processing times by up to 90%.

The Data Warehouse solution will enable the Trust to gain quicker, more effective access to data and eliminate any inconsistencies between different data sources, allowing managers and clinicians to make informed decisions and giving a better understanding of how the Trust is performing.

Paul McQuaid, project manager at NHS Manchester said: “The business intelligence tools from Ardentia best met our operational, regulatory and financial requirements. The combination of these solutions will be crucial to the development of the organisation. They will allow our staff to drill down to obtain valuable patient data, rather than spending time processing documents.

“With a population of 500,000 and approximately 1000 GP referrals each week, we need the right tools to help deal effectively with business issues and meet our goals – Ardentia solutions make this possible for us.”

A further benefit of the solutions is the ability to automatically manage changes in data sets and Healthcare Resource Group (HRG) codes. Previously it would have been time-consuming to process new codes and input them into the system but the Ardentia solution now automates this process, saving internal resource and staff time.

The solutions are also non-proprietary and in a standard industry format so they can easily integrate with other platforms and share data with other standard office tools.

NHS Manchester is currently looking to deploy Ardentia’s 18 Week Wait solution, Pathway Manager, and there are also plans in place to use Ardentia solutions to manage conditions such as childhood obesity and diabetes by alerting practice facilitators to certain patient symptoms or records that could suggest a patient is at risk to ensure the patient is monitored closely.