Service Line Reporting

High quality care within the financial resources available

The demand for high quality and, at the same time, for cost-effective patient care is putting Trusts under more pressure than ever before to improve their management processes and optimise clinical performance. The emphasis on “quality care” in the Darzi report will only increase that pressure as you attempt to keep your Trust financially viable.

Download the Service Line Reporting Data Sheet

Download the Service Line Reporting data sheet to see how SLR can help you drive management improvements is giving service lines the authority to manage their own performance.

An increasingly widespread and vital element that is enabling Trusts to drive management improvements is giving service lines the authority to manage their own performance and set their own strategy. But underpinning this strategy any performance management there must be reliable, accurate and timely information about the activity in your service line. This makes effective service line reporting, providing all the necessary information, an essential tool to achieve the goals set by your strategy.

Ardentia’s Service Line Reporting Solution Does Just That

At Trust level, our intuitive Service Line Reporting (SLR) charting reveals the areas that most need your attention, that may need additional resource to ensure continuity of care, or which give the most cause for concern.

HealthWare Patient Level Costing solution is made available to you as Web-based reports. This provides you with a completely secure environment for your data, and means that it can be made available to any users who need access to it, subject to any security constraints that you may choose to apply.

Within Service Lines themselves, the SLR solution provides the information they need to manage their own performance. In particular, it shows which areas of case mix need most attention to improve efficiency and financial performance or the quality of care but also what resource types are leading to the main problems:

How Does It Work?

The Ardentia Service Line Reporting solution reads data from a general ledger, in the form of cost and income values stored against cost centre and account code combinations.

In a series of passes, the solution allocates these values across:

Cost buckets defined by site (where appropriate), service line, point of delivery and cost pool (e.g. ward nursing, anaesthetist, surgeon, pathology, etc.)
Other cost centre/account code combinations
Overhead pots: after the final pass, the contents of overhead pots are allocated to cost buckets defined by filters associated with each pot, on the basis of the costs already assigned to them

The process is entirely under the control of the Finance Department. Runs can be scheduled or triggered by Finance, for any range of periods. Finance also specifies how many passes to carry out. The solution reports on the amount unallocated after each pass. A log highlights any problems (e.g. closed loops, where costs are allocated backwards and forwards between cost centre/subjective code combinations in successive passes). Reconciliation reports show how sums allocated correspond to the Ledger values.

The solution allocates both cost and income values so that certain ‘cost buckets’, identified by having ‘income’ as their ‘type’, contain income figures.

Since the cost buckets are defined by service line, they directly support service line reporting. Reports are delivered through the Ardentia web-based reporting system, Cassius. It uses multi-dimensional cubes of data that make access rapid and easy to use. It supports consultation of reports by any authorised user, from any machine with Internet Explorer and the Flash tool that is connected to the Trust’s network. Access is governed by user identifier and password, which determine just how much any user can see and are entirely under the control of the Trust.

Fully Future-Proof: A Foundation for Patient Level Costing

Service Line Reporting is an invaluable tool. It enables you to identify quickly and easily where in a Trust a problem is arising.

If the cause of that problem lies in the treatment being delivered to individual patients: a different approach to treatment – better use of prophylactic care, perhaps, or the choice of a particular type of prosthesis, or the use of certain diagnostic tests – may lead to more cost-effective care, at lower cost for the same or even improved quality. However, that can only be identified if analysis can go below the service level down to that of individual patients.

Ardentia’s Patient Level Costing (PLC) solution delivers that ability; and Ardentia Service Line Reporting solution is the first step in the Ardentia PLC solution. So a Trust that has implemented Service Line Reporting can build on it to move directly to Patient Level Costing without losing any existing functionality or software.