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.