E-Health Insider recently published the story about Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust’s deployment of a complete business intelligence solution from Ardentia.
The Trust serves the communities of Wakefield District and North Kirklees, and employs over 7,000 members of staff. The tailored solution has provided the Trust with a central source of clinical data enabling it to further improve healthcare provision and optimise financial management.
You can read the full article here.
This month’s special report on E-Health Insider focuses on business intelligence and includes input from Ardentia’s CEO Tom Mulhern.
The article looks at how the BI market is responding to the NHS reforms set out in the government white paper and its value as providers start to move into an increasingly competitive market, with greater emphasis on patient outcomes.
Tom Mulhern said: “While there is a move towards outcome measures, there will still be a need for trusts to set their own locally defined KPIs. I do not think the end of national targets means the end of BI.”
Carl Kwiatkowski, business and marketing manager at West Suffolk Hospital and an Ardentia BI solutions user added: “Trust boards are expecting more and more accurate information about what is happening in the market and BI provides part of that picture. It is going to go more and more that way; especially with every trust becoming a foundation trust.”
Click here to read the full special report on E-Health Insider.
Today’s announcement by the Department of Health that NPfIT is to be replaced by a new, decentralised approach will be welcomed by many NHS IT managers.
The move looks set to give control over their own systems back to them, whilst maintaining access to the NPfIT features that have found favour, like Choose and Book, PACS and electronic prescribing.
The new, modular approach announced by the DH will also help to encourage localised IT investment and approaches that will directly benefit individual NHS organisations – such as patient-level costing and improved business intelligence tools. It’s hoped that some of the £700M NPfIT savings can be re-invested in these local initiatives.
Looking back to 2003, when NPfIT began, many of the IT developments we take for granted today were far from mainstream – such as widespread broadband access and interconnectivity. It was the best idea at the time, and of course IT futures are hard to predict. We now know that systems interoperability and access doesn’t require such a prescriptive, rigid approach.
As health minister Simon Burns put it in his statement: “Localised decision making and responsibility will create fresh ways of ensuring that clinicians and patients are involved in planning and delivering front line care and driving change.” Let’s hope that this is truly the case.
Having reported a deficit of £4.5 million for 2009-10 in comparison to the predicted £2.1 million, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has faced investigations from independent NHS foundation trust regulator, Monitor, which has since stated that the trust will be subjected to meeting financial review milestones to ensure that these problems are addressed, reports Healthcare Today.
Monitor has expressed that it is keen for trusts to manage their finances independently, which is why it has refrained from using formal powers to intervene at this stage. However, it does raise the issue of just how important it is for trusts to have access to all financial data – right down to the smallest details.
Business intelligence systems, such as Ardentia’s patient level costing solution, allows trusts to review, analyse and report all costs for each and every patient. This can be from the number of minutes spent with a pathologist, to the cost of a specific surgery, which includes staffing and theatre use, to the amount of time spent in a hospital bed on a ward. All of these factors have costs attached, which when totalled can provide a clear indication of just where money is being spent – both effectively and, more importantly, where not so effectively.
For trusts to avoid multi-million pound debts, clinicians need to be working directly with finance managers to ensure there are clear lines of communications on just where money is being spent and where it is most needed.
Difficult decisions are being made in the public sector; the increasing cuts and efficiency savings and the pressure that is building on NHS trusts to further squeeze the budget. While these decisions are proving difficult, the coalition government has made it clear that it does not intend to allow quality of care to suffer as a result of efficiency savings.
Ardentia’s latest thought leadership article from CEO Tom Mulhern, has been published on Public Technology, with the article discussing the different ways trusts are looking to better manage their finances in this difficult economic climate: “The issue of having the right information to hand is more urgent than ever, if we want to ensure that savings are made in the right places. I believe there are two key areas in which management information will be particularly valuable.”
Patient Level Information and Costing allows trusts to access financial information down to patient level, eliminating areas of waste. In addition, Pathfinding enables hospitals to successfully monitor patient pathways to ensure that patients get the correct treatment. Both business intelligence solutions will improve not only NHS finances but also patient experience, by providing the important information needed.
To read the full article click here.
A health think tank has claimed that the NHS is in danger of over-exerting itself, with a huge increase in the number of patients admitted to A&E having been seen over the past five years.
The Independent reports on how statistics show that during this time, more than one million extra patients have been admitted to hospital. The main reason for the high figures is that doctors are said to be admitting people with less severe conditions than in the past. The report by the Nuffield Trust revealed that such high attendances will threaten to bankrupt the NHS if the trend continues.
Accident and Emergency admissions account for more than a third of all patients in hospital and cost about £11bn a year. They have been rising for decades but have soared by almost 12 per cent since 2005, costing an extra £330m a year. The rise is linked to a dramatic increase in short-stay admissions. In England, almost 600,000 more patients were admitted for one day or less in 2008-9 than were five years earlier.
To cut the increasing hospital admissions, the NHS needs to have access to exact details of how long patients stay in hospital for and what the precise costs for each patient. Ardentia’s business intelligence solutions can, and do, deliver this information for NHS Trusts. Ardentia’s Core Activity Reporting enables Trusts to analyse A&E attendances and trends, with the reports displaying a variety of information, including referral sources and type of attendance. With this information to hand, the NHS is able to see where major costs are being incurred and take action to make services more efficient without compromising care.
With the NHS being told it has to save huge amounts of efficiency savings within the next five years, Ardentia has announced the launch of CassiusVision – the latest version of its web-based reporting tool used by more than 80 NHS Trusts and Boards.
The business intelligence solution will provide the NHS with improved flexibility and navigation to identify key areas for efficiency savings. CassiusVision will continue to provide all of the existing benefits of Cassius to users, but has the advantage of new and improved usability and functionality to help the NHS effectively manage and implement the necessary changes required by the latest Government announcements on efficiency savings.
David Beeson, Development Director at Ardentia, says: “Cassius is an integral part of all of our business intelligence solutions, acting as the backbone for the analysis and review of data by NHS organisations. We have taken time to ensure that CassiusVision offers significant improvements to users to assist Trusts in a particularly challenging climate.
“The software will provide managers and clinicians the opportunity to glean key findings in a matter of minutes, which will be essential in making the all important decisions on financial and operational matters to meet the required efficiency savings.”
The Cassius software provides a secure platform to manage, create and distribute reports to authorized users. The software has been designed to help deliver measurable differences to the management of all business intelligence reporting. This in turn makes for easier analysis and helps ensure budgets are being used in the best manner possible. Allowing clinicians and managers to also use Cassius to carry out complex analysis of business intelligence data and highlight specific aspects of reports for easy comparison and discussion.
For more information on CassiusVision call Ardentia on 0844 8481205 or email Martin at martin.brammah@ardetia.co.uk.
The BBC has reported that the British Medical Association’s chairman, Dr Hamish Meldrum, has revealed his concern at the way doctors are having no input into how NHS cuts are being made. He highlighted that the cuts were being introduced in a ‘haphazard’ way, which could lead to a decline in patient care.
Another area highlighted by Dr Meldrum was how cuts in administration would still affect front line care as doctors and nurses often had to pick up this work. This is where we have to be looking to make changes. Technology can play an important role in streamlining administrative processes and ensuring that patient’s details not only stay secure, but that patients’ treatments can be monitored and progressed appropriately, within the required timescales.
While the NHS is one of the few areas of public spending which will not see its budget slashed within the next five years, the health service is being told to make efficiency savings as a result of the increase in pressure on funding and in order to do this effectively, we need to be looking at how we can improve existing procedures, so that we remove waste and do not compromise the level of care.
Ardentia’s Service Line Reporting enables trusts to effectively manage their own performance; in particular it shows which areas need the most attention to improve overall efficiency, and more importantly, the quality of care. The business intelligence solution also highlights the areas that most need attention, including those that may need additional resource to ensure continuity of care or those which give the most cause for concern.
Business intelligence solutions can offer rewards to clinicians, doctors and nurses by monitoring how redundancies and budget restraints are impacting the frontline services and, ultimately, the patients.
The NHS has been told it needs to save £222m of management costs this year, with Health Secretary Andrew Lansley revealing the NHS must cut its management costs by 46% by 2014. Reporting on the news, E-Health Insider highlights how management costs now stand at £1.85 billion and must be reduced by £850m.
Andrew Lansley Health Secretary said: “NHS spending will increase, but so too will demand on NHS services. In order to meet this demand, the NHS needs to make substantial savings and that is why I want to see immediate action this year to reduce management costs so that the savings made can be reinvested in NHS care for patients.”
The BBC reported in March that the number of managers in the NHS in England had risen to almost 45,000, which demonstrated how management were being recruited at five times the rate of qualified nurses.
To ensure that patient care does not decline following on from this announcement, health providers need to look at ways to reduce costs throughout the NHS; identifying where there is waste to be cut.
In order to locate these areas of inefficiency, managers need to have access to details of all procedures, along with their costings and allocations of time. Business intelligence can provide this. Ardentia’s Patient Level Costing software allows users to review exactly how much the treatment of any one patient costs, drilling right down to the minutes spent in surgery or with a specialist clinician. Such data as this will be critical to ensuring the NHS is able to cut costs without cutting the quality of care delivered to patients.
The recent investigation by The Guardian newspaper into death rates from vascular surgery revealed a huge variation in death rates among patients admitted for planned operations.
The Guardian’s report shows how comparing identical areas of activity between hospitals can reveal critical information. Only detailed information on specific hospital procedures can reveal areas where more effective care can be delivered to patients, or savings made. Collecting and analysing accurate patient-level data on outcomes will be key to improving care and efficiency in hospital trusts.
By gathering more data on treatments and outcomes at an identifiable patient level, it’s possible to uncover the exact reasons for the differences in mortality rates. These may include factors beyond the hospital’s control, such as the presence of other underlying conditions or the typical age of patients treated. So accurate, patient-level information and costings is crucial to revealing these factors and showing where treatment can be improved, and efficiencies gained in individual hospitals.
As the leading supplier of business intelligence tools to the NHS, Ardentia has developed a Patient Level Costing solution that is already in use in a number of NHS trusts. The solution enables trusts to accurately measure their performance at individual patient level, including all contributing factors to treatment costs from the number of minutes in theatre to the total amount of bed days and nursing hours required. This identifies the reasons for any excursions from averages and NHS tariffs, helping to improve efficiency and ensure that patients receive the highest quality of care.
