Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust is applying for Foundation Trust status this year and and they face key challenges in SLA reporting and contract monitoring. With operational efficiency and resource productivity in mind, Portsmouth and Mede developed a web-based SLA reporting module. Users at Portsmouth can now group activities from the PAS dataset to compare with the monthly and year-to-date targets for every PCT and specialty. This allows the trust to assign staff to more efficient and effective roles rather than manually produce and validate onerous reports. This application tracks the trust's progress against targets at the PCT specialty level by month. This enables the trust to understand income, volume and value of un-coded activities on an ongoing basis.

Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust have developed a web-based organisational performance dashboard. This functionality allows the board and staff an aggregated view into the ongoing performance of various areas such as strategy, activity, expenditure, overhead, productivity and workforce. The historical challenge was to produce manual spreadsheet- based reports, which used a significant amount of effort and resource each month. The task included pulling together a considerable number of disparate data sets from various departments and to extract the performance metrics from the data. Walsall's approach with the web-based dashboard allows data to be aggregated on a monthly basis and make performance metrics available to various stakeholders from a point-and-click graphical interface. The key objective is to make the performance results easily accessible to the organisation, encouraging as many individuals as possible to be more aware and proactive in managing their performance.

Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust discussed their approach and the importance of engaging the clinical population of the trust in order to effectively improve overall organisational performance. With an intelligence platform that can be shared with clinicians to allow them to easily analyse the financial impact of their performance, clinicians are becoming more interested in learning how they can help improve the trust's financial performance.

Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust was our guest speaker and shared with the group their strategy to improve their performance financially, organisationally, departmentally and culturally through improvements to their coding department.

As a group we discussed the future needs of NHS trusts, such as predictive coding based on historic case mix and volume to avoid delayed income due to coding backlog. We also discussed the benefits and value in providing an individual personalised 'home page', with work lists to increase staff productivity and performance. Another key topic was forecasting to provide trusts additional insight into trends and future needs. We look forward to reporting back to our members and guests our ideas on how to address these areas.

Thank you to all of our cohort members and special guests to make this event fun and successful. We look forward to seeing you at the next MedeConnect!

Warm regards,
The Mede International Team