Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust is to deploy an 18-week wait, data warehouse and Patient Level Costing system from Ardentia, in a bid to meet targets and monitor costs.

The trust will use Ardentia’s Pathway Manager in order to meet national 18-week reporting requirements and manage patient pathways from initial GP referral to acute hospital treatment.

Additionally, the data warehouse and Patient Level Costing solutions will help Trust managers address the deployment of resources and identify potential risks for future financial modeling.

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Ardentia have launched our new Ardentia.tv Web site.

Ardentia.tv lets you watch short films about Ardentia’s solutions available to UK healthcare providers as well as films about our market expertise that makes Ardentia one of the UK’s leading supplier of business intelligence solutions to the healthcare sector.

You can also watch case studies about our powerful 18 Week Wait solution currently helping Dudley Group of Hospitals meet the new Eighteen Week Waits targets and our KPI-driven Performance Management solution enabling Liverpool PCT to manage the provision of healthcare more effectively.

Papworth Hospital and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh take Ardentia healthcare business intelligence solutions.

Papworth Hospital, the leading tertiary referral centre in the country, for cardiac and respiratory conditions is currently implementing an Ardentia data warehouse.

According to Gary Ferguson, the Ardentia account manager responsible for Papworth, the problem in the hospital was the need to get much quicker and more effective access to patient data. “Papworth has vitally important data floating around in a wide range of systems that don’t talk to each other. Inevitably, inconsistencies can develop between different sources of data. In today’s NHS, management and clinicians just have to have a much better handle on what’s happening within Trusts. This means that information has to be held centrally with functions in place to ensure that it’s reliable and coherent. It also means that reports have to be available that meet the real management needs of the Trust.”

So if we’re emphasising consistency and reliability, does that mean that data quality is a concern?

“Of course it is,” Gary continues, “and I think one of the attractions of the system is that it is built on a data warehouse with functions that allow data to be validated before releasing it to users. Just as important, though, are the reports – once the data quality is good, the information has to be presented to users in a form that’s relevant to them. And, of course, it has to be made available to users who may be anywhere within the Trust or even outside it, which is why web access, with appropriate security controls, is so important.”

That’s what makes the Ardentia HealthWare system attractive to hospitals such as Papworth. It combines a tried and tested data warehouse including powerful data quality functions with the Cassius tool for fully web-based reporting. This means that the system delivers validated information, on the things that matter to clinicians and managers, where they want it and when they want it.

Similar considerations certainly guided the decision at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh to go for HealthWare. The Trust formerly used the HiPPO data warehouse system supplied by InFocus Health, now a subsidiary of Ardentia. They have now decided to upgrade to Ardentia’s HealthWare and take advantage, like Papworth, of the Cassius Web-based reporting functions.

However, Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh have gone further. They have also been following the way the Ardentia Pathway Manager has developed into the first tool for managing eighteen week waits running live in the NHS, and still the only tool that does so based on a data warehouse. So they decided to include Pathway Manager in their project.

This makes them the seventh site to adopt Pathway Manager for this purpose, confirming Ardentia’s position in the lead of suppliers of systems for eighteen-week waits.

Similarly, they have ordered Ardentia’s Patient Level Costing system, to extend and enhance the costing functions they had already developed in the Trust. With Dudley Group of Hospitals and Morecambe Bay University Hospital Trust close to going live with the PLC module, this make Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh the third Trust to adopt the Ardentia solution in this area.

As Gary Ferguson, who also manages the Wrightingon, Wigan and Leigh account for Ardentia, points out, “This is a great vote of confidence in Ardentia’s solution. Putting in the data warehouse and both of these strategic applications, Pathway Manager and Patient Level Costing, will be an exciting challenge and it will put the Trust into the forefront of the intelligent use of information for hospital management.”

Tom Mulhern, who heads up Sales and Marketing in Ardentia, added, “It will be great to see Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh running both Pathway Manager and Patient Level Costing. As well as strengthening our position as leaders for eighteen-week waits and a strong contended for patient costing, the fact that both systems will be running live in the same Trust, as they will be at Dudley and Morecambe Bay, will means that they will be among the first to start costing pathways. We believe that fully costed patient pathways are going to be massively important tool for understanding what happens in Trust and managing them more effectively.”

Ardentia has a track record of delivering solutions that focus on the issues that matter most to healthcare managers. It is not surprise that increasing numbers of Trusts are turning to Ardentia to meet their strategic information needs.

While most of us in Britain love our NHS, we also love to complain about it. With the likes of Hospitals closing, drug-resistant bugs and services being inaccessible or inadequate.

Despite the above, we also take pride in our uniquely special service. If there are problems, we tend to blame government and the frenetic pace of reform – a complaint often reflected within the health service itself.

The background noise is in danger of drowning out the importance of one reform that promises to be more far-reaching than any of the others.

This is the government commitment to reduce the time between referral and treatment to no more than eighteen weeks for all patients by the end of 2008. Just another reform? I think not. This initiative will make patients’ experience of access to health services in England better than at any time since the foundation of the NHS. Let’s not forget that it is only a few years ago that waiting times for treatment of over two years were not uncommon.

Managers, however, have to face up to a significant consequence of that change. In the past, if healthcare demand outstripped the capacity of hospital resources, the waiting list provided a buffer to absorb the excess demand. It delayed demand until the resources were once more available. Now that margin of flexibility is being lost: resource is going to have to be made available, within only a few weeks of the hospital becoming aware of the demand.

Hospital managers are going to have to think longitudinally, in terms of pathways of care. An outpatient attendance is not an isolated event but closely related to the inpatient admission that follows it. They have to think that a delay today in an outpatient attendance may have a serious knock-on effect on other events in several weeks time.

Some changes are already in hand to help managers deal with these new requirements. The new patient minimum data sets, version 6, will include pathway indicators. However, few systems can provide them yet. In any case, just being able to identify pathways is not enough. We need to be able to flag up those pathways that are drifting into trouble, where a delay in one event may have consequences on the others. In short, we need predictive reporting telling managers where they need to concentrate their attention in plenty of time to take action and avoid breaches.

In addition, they need to know what the resource implications of those actions are. If patients are brought in early to avoid a possible breach, what implications does this have for resources? When might extra capacity be needed? To answer these questions, we have to associate information about resources with pathway events. That means a completely new approach to patient activity information.

The eighteen-week initiative will deliver a major improvement in quality of service to patients. But it’s going to mean a great increase in the number and the intensity of the challenges faced by managers. And it’s going to demand a new approach to the design of healthcare information tools, the quality of the indicators they deliver and the timeliness with which they deliver them.

This article by David Beeson, Ardentia’s Marketing Manager, first appeared in the September Issue of Health Director.

The Ardentia solution for Eighteen-Week wait management, developed in collaboration with Microsoft, has been successfully trialled at Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust.

In June 2004, the NHS Improvement Plan set the target that ‘by 2008, no-one will wait longer than 18 weeks from GP referral to hospital treatment.’ This has made it necessary for hospitals and Primary Care Trusts across England to implement systems that can effectively monitor referral to treatment (RTT) waiting times. At stake are significant amounts of revenue, as Trusts may have to call on private provision to avoid breaches, and even face penalties if they do breach the eighteen-week limit.

The system, created specifically to monitor referral-to-treatment (RTT), manages a patient’s entire pathway through the healthcare system, from the initial referral or attendance at A&E, through hospital care, and back out into the community or to a GP.

The Pathway Manager links patient information from disparate systems, including:

• Waiting list data, to identify when patients were referred for treatment.
• Outpatient data, for information about outpatient attendances.
• Admitted patient care data, for information about treatment as an admitted patient, i.e. an in-patient (stays at least one night) or a day case (discharged the same day as admitted).
• Radiology and pathology lab data, for information about diagnostic tests.

The Pathway Manager brings together this information to build patient pathways, mapping all the events that take place for a patient following referral.

These steps alone represent major time savings for healthcare managers. However, the system also provides a ‘Referral-to-Treatment’ database, allowing detailed analysis at an individual patient level, outlining all the events along their RTT pathway. It can also report on the quality of all key data required to derive pathway and calculate waiting times.

Following the recent successful pilot in Dudley Hospital, John Uttley Deputy Director of Information, Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust said: “The pilot is proving to be a real success. We have a system which exceeded our original expectations and delivers everything we need to help reach the government’s 18 week target.”

John Coulthard, Microsoft’s director of health, commented: “This is a really innovative application that addresses a real and immediate need of the health service. Every hospital and PCT in England has to manage referral-to-treatment pathways, so it’s great to be involved in something that offers an effective solution.”

Gary Luke, Ardentia’s managing director, stated: “By bringing together a range of collaborative technologies, we been able to create a really unique and effective tool. As well as providing an overall view of patient progress, it allows drilling down to the level where clinicians can intervene to sort out any problems there may be. Our partnership with Microsoft has been fundamental, since it is the power and ease of use of their tools that allowed us to get out product to market so fast.”

Ardentia is pleased to announce that the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust has called on Ardentia to upgrade its data warehouse.

As well as all the patient activity modules and Payment by Results, Morecambe has decided to implement the Ardentia modules:

• Pathway Manager to monitor patients progress along care pathways, to ensure that eighteen-week wait targets are hit.
• Patient Level Costing to ensure that individual records of patient care are attributed costs. This means that the Trust can carry out full profit and loss reporting at any level – individual patients, specialties, consultants, case mix group, etc. – as well as meeting the requirements of service-line reporting.
• Performance Manager to provide the trust with functions to view Key Performance Indicators and plan and monitor associated actions.

Ardentia is delighted that Morecambe has shown this confidence in the HealthWare tools and is set to become one of the most advanced information users in the NHS.

Trust opts for only fully-implemented solution for eighteen-week waits

Having completed its implementation of the HealthWare modules for admitted patient care, outpatients and A&E, as well as the PbR module, Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals Foundation Trust has now ordered the Pathway Manager RTT module from Ardentia.

Pathway Manager builds patient pathways from existing Trust data, allowing Trusts to monitor patients’ progress into and through the healthcare process. Following completion of trials at Dudley Group of Hospitals, with Chesterfield, Milton Keynes and Worcester as further pilots, it is the first live information tool supporting Trusts in hitting the target of reducing referral to treatment times to eighteen weeks.

Basildon was one of the first ten Foundation Trusts. Working with Ardentia, they are equipping themselves with the information management tools that go with their position at the forefront of health service development.

38 people covering 13 acute Trusts, 7 Commissioners and Ardentia, attended the annual, two-day user group meeting at the Hinckley Island Hotel on 18 and 19 June 2007.

Monday saw lively discussion of the way forward in some key product areas and of real experiences from several clients.

Representatives of Dudley Group of Hospitals were warmly congratulated on being the first Trust to implement a fully working system for monitoring eighteen-week waits, the Ardentia Pathway Manager solution, demonstrated at the meeting. Three other sites will be launching their systems in the next few weeks.

There was also a demonstration of the Patient Level Costing system, about to be implemented by two Trust sites.

Caroline Rand from Liverpool PCT demonstrated the Performance Manager system being used to monitor Key Performance Indicators to tremendous benefit throughout Liverpool.

Steven Johns of Coventry PCT presented the highly positive results of a trial of the NetSearch product.

Richard Wood from Somerset PCT showed how using Ardentia systems are helping him to organise secondary care commissioning through the county.

Martin Callingham from Newham University Hospital Trust talked about the new ways in which information is being used as a strategic resource in Trusts.

Monday evening provided the means to combine pleasure with the business of the day. Everyone seemed to enjoy the opportunity, though some enjoyed it far more – perhaps one should say far more deeply, and for far longer – than others.

Despite that, there were no absences the following morning when a series of breakout sessions allowed special interest groups to be set up for Acute Care, Commissioning and Mental Health, as well as discussion about the future development of products in clients who were previously with InFocus Health (acquired by Ardentia in spring 2006).

The final session was something of a high-point of the meeting, when Peter Donnelly joined us from the Department of Health and brilliantly, as well as wittily, outlined his view of the need to implement patient level costing throughout the NHS, to change fundamentally the HRG system and to reform the system of remunerating hospitals by Payment by Results. He provided a great send-off to delegates at the end of a stimulating two-day event.

Members of the user group elected a new steering committee, to be chaired by Debbie Anderson of Durham and Darlington Trust, and containing six other members representing Acute Trusts, Mental Health Trusts and Commissioners.

Ardentia are holding a meeting of its User Group on Monday 18th and Tuesday 19th June at The Hinckley Island Hotel Leicester.

The User Group meeting is open to all Ardentia clients, whether they are using the HealthWare or HiPPO systems.

The purpose of the User Group is to promote debate within the Ardentia user community and guide our product development so that your Ardentia solutions continue to meet the evolving needs of your organisation. The meeting will be an excellent opportunity to swap ideas with other clients and to plan together with each other and with the company the way forward for all our systems.

The meeting will focus on a number of key health care business needs:

• For Trusts: Patient Level Costing. Working at patient level bridges the gap between general management and clinicians, giving the cost of delivering care to each patient in a hospital. Combined with PbR, it allows you to monitor profit and loss at patient level and at many others: HRG, Consultant, patient demographics, etc. In particular it provides all the functions needed for Service-line reporting.
• For Trusts and PCTs: Pathway Manager: What do you need for monitoring referral to treatment times, including eighteen-week waits in England or 26-week waits in Wales?
• For Trusts and PCTs: Performance Manager for Key Performance Indicators, developed in partnership with Liverpool PCT. It allows you to define the indicators that interest you, build targets and actions associated with them, assign them to staff and monitor progress. Being web-based, the indicators and plans can all be monitored by any authorised staff anywhere in the organisation.
• For Mental Health Trusts: the Artemis mental health information system, covering community, outpatient and inpatient treatment, including bed occupancy rates, contact analysis by type of contact and staff group, patient reviews and workload monitoring. The first meeting of the special interest group of Mental Health Trust users will also take place at this user group.
• For Commissioners: The User Group will also be the occasion of a first meeting of a special interest group on Commissioning set up on the initiative of existing Ardentia clients and to be led by a senior commissioning manager

In addition, a more technical stream will consider the future development of the HealthWare, Hippo and Cassius products that you are now using.

To register for the User Group, please contact Ruth Simpson, by email at ruth.simpson@ardentia.co.uk or by phone on 0870 267 0008.

Ardentia are attending the Smart Healthcare Expo at Earls Court One today and tomorrow (12th and 13th June).

Smart Healthcare is a new exhibition and conference event for serious decision-makers specialising in public sector healthcare IT. This ICT exhibition and conference is focused on the latest technology and for technologists, with key decision-makers from across healthcare having the opportunity to ‘see, touch and feel’ the latest new ICT healthcare products, services, innovations and ideas from leading ICT suppliers.

We will be more than pleased to chat to you about any of our solutions, so please stop by.