By Justin Thomas
As the NHS struggles with overwhelming pressure on resources, there has never been greater opportunity for private providers to provide contracted services.
That said, Trusts and CCGs are becoming more demanding of private providers, who must demonstrate that they can manage fluctuations in patient volumes, provide the most efficient service at the best price, and align themselves with NHS England’s new digital strategy.
Our clients tell us that our platform, has been a significant factor when it comes to winning new business. Dr. Johann Alberts, Director of IT and Transformation at Alliance Medical, for example, recently commented: “The enhanced technical capabilities provided by Lumeon’s Care Pathway Manager were one of the key features that allowed us to secure the NHS National PET-CT contract.”
With this in mind, we’ve put together six ways Care Pathway Manager can help strengthen your offering to the NHS.
1) Manage more patients by automating workflows
Lean, cost-effective processes that produce a consistently good standard of care are at the heart of successful NHS contracts. Dan Horne, Head of Business Analysis at Lumeon, explains how automation rules can add value:
“Many operational processes take up a huge amount of staff time but are simply following the same replicated protocol (albeit a complex one). Automating these protocols can save a considerable amount of time and money. Alliance Medical, for example, were able to reduce the time taken to review and distribute reports back to original NHS hospitals from 6 hours of manual process, to less than 30 minutes, by adding intelligent rulesets.”
2) Deliver value-based care
CCGs are prepared to outsource to private providers, provided they can prove that they can deliver the best value both to Trusts and their patients. To do this, you need to be able to reliably monitor outcomes and processes across every site. Care Pathway Manager can help you track objective and subjective outcomes data in a consistent way, and you can build and automatically distribute reports with Lumeon Analytics. With an increasing focus on ongoing wellbeing, you can also track outcomes through automated e-forms and use patient responses to alert staff to intervene earlier in the treatment or recovery process.
3) Build custom care pathways to meet the different needs of each Trust
Each NHS Trust may send referrals to you in a slightly different format or require a different way of reporting for different procedures. For example, some might only want to have reports emailed to groups of people, others might also want to use a portal to check on the status of patients. Being able to build automated pathways with custom rules for accepting and distributing information, helps you consistently deliver rapid, high standard service.
4) Proactively manage SLAs
While the NHS is no longer being fined for missing waiting time targets, Trusts still have to show ‘improved performance’. Our SLA times can help providers proactively avoid breaches by alerting staff about outstanding activities for particular patients that are about to cross the ‘close to breach’ threshold for their particular contract. For example, if a report hasn’t been generated within 24 hours and the SLA is 48 hours, it can automatically change the colour of a referral, create a task, put it to the top of a dashboard or send an email to a reviewer or referrer asking them to urgently provide the missing information.
5) Improve capacity and patient flow
Lumeon captures data about every stage of the care pathway. This means you can monitor what sort of resourcing demand each referral typically creates, and factor in seasonal variations. This data can be used to create predictive staffing models so patient journeys are properly resourced. You can also create new pathways that outsource work, for example, to external call centres or external reviewers.
6) Maximise referral volume using eRS
If you’re not on the NHS’s electronic referral platform, you could be missing out on an untapped stream of business. Our customers have seen up to 70% increase in appointment uplift after listing their services on eRS, using Lumeon’s integration.
We can help you set up automatic appointment publishing rules, that you can periodically review and edit, in order to ensure you are maximizing income from your referral traffic. Once an appointment has been booked, you can also set up automated rulesets to manage patient flow for each particular type of referral according to the contract or procedure.
Interested in winning more NHS business? Contact us to find out more.
You can also watch the full Alliance Medical video here.