Know where they’re coming from; know where they’re going.

As a healthcare provider it’s important that you understand precisely where each of your referrals is coming from, specialty by specialty, case type by case type. To help maximise your income you should be able to answer questions like:

• Why is a GP practice a couple of miles away referring cardiology cases to another trust 20 miles away?
• Why is a practice referring nearly all of its ophthalmology workload to you and next to none of its paediatric care?
• Why are you receiving a lower number of referrals of cardiology cases this year compared to the previous 2 years?

Similarly, if you’re a healthcare commissioner you need to know where your GP Practices are referring cases for acute care. To ensure you’re commissioning the best quality care as cost effectively as possible you need to know the answers to questions like:

• Why are GP practices serving similar patient populations sending cases to different providers for the same treatment?
• Why are GP practices sending cases to one provider when you have established that another provider offers the same service more effectively?

Ardentia’s innovative new Activity Flow Analytics solution is the first step for both providers and commissioners as you look for the answers to those questions. This is because Activity Flow Analytics’ intuitive graphical interface shows you exactly where the patients referred to you have come from as well as where the patients not coming to you have been sent, enabling you to concentrate your efforts to improve the referral flows you handle.

Visualise Your Referral Data

Built on top of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology, Activity Flow Analytics displays your referral volumes on a map. Drop-down menus allow you to drill-down through the referral information by a range of selectors including specialty, HRG, location and period. This means that you can quickly understand your referral flows not just overall but according to the kind of case involved or the areas they come from, as well as seeing how the pattern changes through time.

Seeing more detail about an Organisation is as simple as hovering your mouse over the location of that Organisation on the map. This instantly displays high-level, referral trend information for that Organisation which, for example, shows you a provider’s market share for a particular HRG code. And with just a few clicks of the mouse you can analyse the referral information in greater detail. For example, you could further analyse referrals by specialty by age and sex giving you an overview of your referrals case mix.