New Patient level Information and Costing Systems are short-listed by the Department of Health

MedeFinance was invited to present at the PLICS workshop hosted by the Department of Health 16-17 of April. More than 100 attendees from over 40 organisations including SHA, PCTs and acute trusts attended the 2 day event. Mede was one of the short-listed suppliers of PLICS presenting their solutions. We demonstrated from a live demo the solution’s ability to interlink granular patient details such as pharmacy records to patient activity data. The solution successfully aggregated costs from every item dispensed for the patient and populated the supplies cost at the patient spell and episode levels.

Mede eliminates the guess work in costing. We focus on the ability to bring in various data elements at the most detailed level to build up a complete picture of both costs and income for every activity, giving hospitals a truly effective costing and income management solution.

Are you ready for more choice for patients?

Ministers recently announced a series of new initiatives to support patient choice, including the extension of choice to elective orthopaedic treatments and new support tools for patients to use when selecting treatment providers. This puts increasing pressure on trusts to achieve and maintain Foundation status, particularly when choice is expected to extend to all treatments by next fiscal year. The DH’s new online tools will give patients additional transparency into hospital waiting times, performance and patient satisfaction prior to booking. Will you know the truth about your hospital’s performance before the patients? Find out how organisations such as Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust are getting up-to-date and accurate information relating to their hospital performance.

Improvements to patient flow

Healthcare Commission’s latest press release showed that over 90% of the surveyed 80,000 patients were pleased with their experience at an NHS hospital in England. However, it also suggested that there is a great deal of room for improvement. Citing waiting times, Healthcare Commission Chief Executive Anna Walker states that “trusts need to improve patient’s journey throughout all parts of the hospital, from arriving at A&E to discharge.”*

After speaking with many trusts from all over England, MedeFinance has found, most trusts have methods in place to track patient satisfaction and activities at each department. However, most have difficulty seeing the “complete picture” of a patient’s journey to pin point the bottlenecks. Many trusts cite that a lack of time and resources has made timely reports with accurate, indisputable data difficult to produce regularly and frequently. Furthermore, to link separate files such as A&E records and theatre times with individual in-patient records is nearly impossible without the help of “an army of analysts.”

Trusts such as the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital and the Walsall Hospitals have looked beyond the hospital walls to find the right tools and support they need to achieve their goals. By installing access to a centralised source of activity data for their staff and a process to extract data regularly, these trusts have set up a strategic platform to manage patient flow.

* http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKL154585220070516