EHI Special Report – Business Intelligence

Debbie Williams

Blog, Friday 24th June 2011

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In the latest EHI Special Report on Business Intelligence in the NHS, Tom Mulhern, CEO of Ardentia, comments on the increasing sophistication of care providers in their approach to and use of patient level costing information.

The report looks at how trusts in England have been gathering, analysing and interpreting patient-level information to give clinicians a complete view of the care delivered to patients, and the associated costs. This in turn enables meaningful, evidence-based dialogue between commissioners and providers.

The report focuses on Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust, and how it produces a detailed account of care services delivered and costs for every patient it treats, as a result of implementing Ardentia’s Patient Level Costing solution.

Tom said: “At that level of granularity, Trusts are able to get into comparing treatment costs for patients with similar conditions across different clinicians. It is not an easy process but the value from what you can achieve is enormous.”

You can read the full EHI report here

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Viewpoint: ‘Go for Sophisticated Pathways Analysis’

Debbie Williams

Blog, Friday 3rd June 2011

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In an article on GPonline, Ardentia’s CEO Tom Mulhern provides an insight into why GP consortia – as planned NHS commissioners – need to work with sophisticated patient pathways to truly understand whether a provider can offer efficient and effective services.

Tom explains the ‘yawning gap’ that can exist between simplistic figures representing a ‘typical’ pathway and actual patient experience witnessed by individual consultants.

For commissioners, this means they need an additional layer of data to really discover what is happening at the core of a provider’s system and effectively evaluate its offering.

Tom said: “If GP consortia are to be effective commissioners, they must ensure their healthcare IT lets them make ‘apples with apples’ comparisons between providers.

“Seeing data showing what happens to a patient cohort at different stages in the pathway is a world away from the genuinely illuminating ability to follow and analyse individual cases from referral to discharge.”

To read the full article on GPonline click here.

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35% More Patients Waiting Over 6 Weeks For Diagnosis

Debbie Williams

Blog, Friday 20th May 2011

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New data released by the NHS states that waiting times for diagnostic tests have risen by 35%, in just one month.

MRI scans and heart sonograms are amongst the 15 tests included in the report, with almost 11,000 people waiting more than 6 weeks for these key diagnoses in March 2011.

According to the Mail Online, the topic has caused ‘heated rows’ between Labour Leader Ed Milliband and PM David Cameron, as figures have risen by 184% since the change in Government last year.

Ardentia’s Waiting Lists reporting solution helps monitor patient activity and notifies users of waiting times that will exceed local and national standards. Healthcare professionals can also analyse monthly trends and compare waiting times by operative procedure to provide effective waiting list management.

To find out more about Ardentia’s solutions, click here

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Patient Care From a Pathway Perspective

Debbie Williams

Blog, Friday 21st January 2011

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Ardentia’s CEO Tom Mulhern recently took part in a Health Service Journal webinar to discuss how commissioning care from a pathway perspective can help to reduce clinical variation, generate cost savings and deliver the best outcomes.

Joining him in the discussion was David Arrowsmith, Head of Information at Derbyshire County PCT, who carried out a pilot study on pathways for cataracts and angina with the help of Ardentia.

With mounting pressure from the Department of Health to contribute to the £20bn savings required across the NHS, without compromising quality of care, both providers and commissioners are increasingly looking at patient care from a pathway perspective.

By linking data on patient events from different sources along with their associated costs, healthcare organisations can generate a costed care pathway, helping to define and localise best practice care journeys and reduce clinical variation.

The webinar explores this area in great depth, and discusses whether commissioning based on pathways is the way of the future, what organisations should consider when defining pathways, and the subsequent impact on providers.

You can watch the free webinar on HSJ by clicking here.

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Outcomes Framework to Improve Patient Care

Debbie Williams

Blog, Wednesday 22nd December 2010

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The NHS is to scrap its target measures in favour of a new Outcomes Framework following the release of the White Paper and the consultation ‘Transparency in outcomes- a framework for the NHS’.

Traditionally the NHS has focused on process-driven targets such as waiting times, making health outcomes less of a priority. This new framework seems to reflect how the NHS is moving toward patient-centred incentives by prioritising the outcome of healthcare rather than the targets.

There will be particular focus on tackling five key areas where the NHS is expected to deliver improved outcomes for patients. These include preventing premature deaths, enhancing the lives of those with long-term illnesses, aiding recovery from ill health, ensuring patients have a positive experience of care and making sure people are treated in a safe environment and protected from undue harm.

In order to successfully adhere to this framework, the NHS will need to deliver improved healthcare without significantly increasing expenditure. And to demonstrate how they are meeting these national outcome measures, it’s important that Trusts have access to robust data on patient costings and pathways, reinforcing the need for effective Business Intelligence solutions.

To read the official Department of Health’s press release click here. You can also find out more about it on Health Insurance & Protection.

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Health Boards Urged to Accurately Compare Costs

Debbie Williams

Blog, Wednesday 17th November 2010

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A report has concluded that health boards should improve the way they compare costs to tackle budget constraints.

According to the Press Association, Holyrood’s Public Audit Committee has asked the Scottish Government to explain how it will address the issue, following an investigation into orthopaedic services.

MSPs investigated the service after a report from public spending watchdog Audit Scotland found the NHS could save about £2 million a year if boards stopped purchasing hip and knee joints from different suppliers.

The committee also urged the Government to improve the quality of data collection and investigate why orthopaedic cases increased by only 12% despite a rise in funding and a 49% increase in consultant numbers.

Committee convener Hugh Henry said: “NHS boards did not appear to be able to accurately compare their costs and productivity with other NHS boards to identify how savings and efficiencies could be realised – this information is vital given future budget constraints.”

At Ardentia, we also believe that having access to high quality financial data is vital to enable managers to make informed business decisions. With Business Intelligence tools, managers and clinicians can drill down into the costs associated with each treatment, ensuring inefficiencies are driven out in the right places to improve care delivery and patient experience.

It’s only by having this level of detail that Trusts can deliver the level of savings proposed by the Government while ensuring care does not suffer as a result.

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Finding the Pathway to Savings

Debbie Williams

Blog, Monday 27th September 2010

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With mounting pressure on the NHS to make efficiency savings and drive down expenditure, the question arises as to how trusts will make these cuts whilst still delivering high-quality care.

In this situation, having the right information to hand is essential to ensure that savings are made in the right places – and this is the view of CEO Tom Mulhern in Ardentia’s latest thought leadership article published on Pro Health Service Zone.

The article discusses the different ways trusts are looking to better manage their finances and how accessing information about patient pathways and costing is key in ensuring waste, not care, is being cut.

Patient Level Information and Costing allows trusts to access financial information down to patient level, drilling right down to the minutes spent in surgery or with a specialist clinician. In addition, pathway analytics tools provide the patient-level insight needed to ensure patients are receiving the correct treatment. Having access to this kind of data will not only improve NHS finances, but also patient experience, by providing managers and clinicians with the information they need at the right time.

You can read the full article here.

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West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust Deploys Ardentia’s Activity Flow Analytics

Debbie Williams

Blog, Thursday 16th September 2010

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This article published on Pro Health Service Zone looks at how Ardentia’s Activity Flow Analytics (AFA) has helped West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust to improve business operations and maximise income.

The Trust wanted a method for verifying referral data to support robust business planning across all services. By deploying Ardentia’s AFA, managers now have full visibility of patient referral patterns from local practices, and can track and assess where patients were referred to a hospital from, as well as the hospital or clinic that they have been referred to.

Gareth Corser, West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust’s Director of Strategy, described AFA as being “instrumental” in helping the Trust to use resources effectively, to improve income, quality of care and value for money.

He said: “The solution has been particularly successful in helping us to understand changing referral patterns to support corporate business planning processes. The Trust’s Business Manager attends clinical meetings to discuss referral patterns with clinicians and helps them to understand changes in referral patterns.”

For more details on Ardentia’s Activity Flow Analytics solution, visit: http://www.ardentia.co.uk/solution/activity-flow-analytics/

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Collaboration Key to Maintain High Quality Care

Debbie Williams

Blog, Monday 13th September 2010

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A report by independent health charity the Nuffield Trust has underlined the importance of collaboration as well as competition among health and social care providers, in order to ensure patients receive high quality care that is responsive to their needs.

The report, ‘Removing the policy barriers to integrated care in England’, referred to in an article on The British Journal of Healthcare Computing and Information Management, examines five areas in England where local clinicians and managers are already working together to break down the barriers between different health professionals and services.

As well as exploring the five case studies, the report underlines seven key policy barriers the Government needs to address to enable health and social care providers to deliver successful integrated care for patients at a reasonable cost.

However, according to Dr Judith Smith, Nuffield Trust Head of Policy and co-author of the report, the Government still has “tough choices” ahead if it is to deliver the efficiency gains in the NHS that are needed.

She said: “Short-term savings can be made but the extent of the productivity gains that are required mean that we have to do things fundamentally differently in the NHS.

“While the evidence base is still mixed, encouraging integration between providers of care is the most rational way forward to reduce fragmented care, the avoidable ill health it produces, and to improve efficiency.”

In order for healthcare providers to make these efficiency gains, they need to be able to access high quality data to identify exactly where savings can be made, without affecting care. Business intelligence solutions like Ardentia’s Patient Level Costing can provide this, allowing managers to review the treatment costs of each patient, including the minutes spent in surgery or with a clinician.

This financial clarity allows Trusts to generate long-term savings by cutting waste, not care.

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The End of NPfIT Is Also a Beginning

Debbie Williams

Blog, Thursday 9th September 2010

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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.

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