What is PLICS?

What is PLICS?

Patient-Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS) are data collection and cost information tools used to collect and analyse patient data that will help measure and manage costs. They help NHS organisations make sense of the costs of delivering specific services to patients and find out where costs can be reduced or efficiencies can be maximised.

But how exactly do they work? And what makes them so beneficial for the NHS? We’ll be exploring this in this blog to help you make informed decisions about your own PLICS solution.

How do PLICS work?

PLICS collate data from a range of records and sources to give you intricate details into a patient’s diagnosis, treatment, length of stay at a hospital and more. Collecting patient data from diagnosis to treatment creates a granular and accurate picture of the associated costs that come with patient care– much more valuable than via traditional methods like top-down allocation costs.

PLICS can also calculate the cost of each patient’s care and treatment, allowing you to view patient variations in much greater detail. If you can leverage PLICS, you’ll find it incredibly powerful thanks to its ability to link cost data at patient level to guarantee optimal patient care outcomes. You can use this information to make informed decisions about treatments and resources for patients or even to negotiate insurance rate payments.

Benefits of using PLICS

PLICS can offer plenty of useful and accurate data on a case-by-case basis that exceeds the capabilities of traditional costing methods. Its range of benefits include:
• Gives managers and clinicians a detailed picture of costs to help them judge the legitimacy of costs across all patients.
• Shows any discrepancies that may be resulting in higher or lower costs across the organisation or pinpoint inefficiencies between teams to help determine what to do about them.
• Enhances the accuracy of budget projections and provides the necessary insights to model changes for patient groups.
• Highlights patient demographics and treatment pathways to optimise decision-making in resource allocation, process improvement and quality of care for patients.

PLICS use cases

PLICS data can be impactful in many instances, especially when validating cost variations. A successfully integrated PLICS will allow users to share their learnings on how to detect, diagnose and address cost variations across the wider organisation to change or improve costing processes.

To get a sense of just how much more than the NCC submission can be accomplished through a PLICS system, take a look at some of our client case studies:

CACI as your PLICS provider

Making sure you have the tools to effectively engage with stakeholders across your organisation is at the heart of what we do. We help equip you with the necessary skills to get the most out of your patient costing solution, meet your requirements and improve patient outcomes.

CACI’s very own PLICS, Synergy, is a state-of-the-art patient level costing solution complete with fast calculation times, exception analysis with full audit trails and patient activity mapping. It also comes with prepopulated standards (datasets, cost allocations and methodologies), which will enable you to produce costs easily and efficiently at patient level.

It’s an easy-to-use, simple to set up solution that is highly secure (HSCN connected facility), with Healthcare Costing Standards configured.

To learn more about PLICS and how our costing system could help your organisation, visit our Synergy page.

Data catalogs: are they important and do I need one?

Data catalogs: are they important and do I need one?

In the age of big data and self-service analytics, data catalogs have become the standard for metadata management, helping analysts and other users find the information they need and get the visibility required for good data governance. But what is a data catalog, how do you know if your business needs one and crucially – how do you go about implementing a successful data catalog?

What is data catalog?

A data catalog is a collection of metadata, combined with data management and search tools. It maintains an inventory of data assets through the discovery, description and organisation of datasets. Through providing context to the relevant user (be that an analyst, data scientist or any other key stakeholder), they are able to find and understand datasets in order to extract business value.

A good data catalog should act as a single version of the truth through unification of all sources of metadata which can be disseminated to the right people at the right time, with the right permissions in place – making it both collaborative, compliant and secure. When implemented correctly, a data catalog will provide you with a clear understanding of your datasets in order to unlock the value you in your data and improve business intelligence and insight.

How do I know if my business needs a data catalog?

If your business is getting serious about a data-driven strategy, you’re going to need a data catalog.

The drive to implement a data-driven strategy is usually born from a company’s desire to transform the way they do business through use of data analysis and interpretation to make more effective and informed decisions.

The natural first stage of this strategy is to identify, combine and manage multiple sources of data. It’s not unusual for a company’s data to be siloed across multiple systems and sources such as data warehouses, data lakes, legacy systems and cloud-based repositories. Bringing these sources together into a single version of the truth helps solve both the challenge to the user of seeing the full picture, as well as the data governance issue that fragmented data presents.

If you’re looking for your users to gain effective and meaningful insights from the data held across your organisation, an optimal way to achieve this is by using a data catalog.

A data catalog can help organisations who are struggling with manually identifying data assets that deliver value as well as improving data efficiency, creating more context around your data and reducing the risk of errors in your data.

But by far the biggest benefit we see in companies with a data catalog is the impact on self-service analytics. With a continued increase in the number of stakeholders across an organisation that use analytics to support their activities and decision making, it becomes critical for data to be transparent and accurate, as well as accessible at the point of need, without the admin required to simply find and understand the data.

Through use of a data catalog, business and data analysts can search and find the data immediately, with access to all of the relevant datasets, helping them to evaluate and make informed choices. Quality of analysis is then improved by users spending sufficient time on the analysis over the admin of data preparation.

Our experience

Through CACI’s work with one of the world’s leading global financial services organisations, our team have deployed an enterprise data catalog that allows full visibility of all streams of data. This has supported improvement of data quality, as well as ensuring GDPR compliance.

By being able to see the full lineage of the data – where it has come from, where it is going and who will have visibility to what datasets, this institution is empowered to implement a level of data governance that can only truly be achieved through cataloguing to the most granular detail.

Any changes to the data are immediately highlighted so that appropriate action can be taken, or it can be used for future insight.

If you are looking for a data catalog, but aren’t sure on where to get started, why not speak to one of our team who can guide you through the steps of the process.

How do our youth justice system responses help or hinder trauma victims?

How do our youth justice system responses help or hinder trauma victims?

Mitigating the impact of trauma in young people is central to helping them build resilience, trust and relationships. This starts with the professionals they come into contact with, from youth justice workers to social workers and teachers. Keeping track of this process is vital to it succeeding, but how does the existing system response across the professionals involved help or hinder it?

We recently hosted a panel discussion exploring how we can identify, assess and mitigate the impact of child trauma in young offenders. You can watch a replay here. One of the central themes was examining the role of the systems that the various professional bodies involved with a young offender have in place. Is there sufficient sharing of knowledge and experience? Is there a robust framework in place that puts the young person first?

With each body relying upon its own system to underpin its support of a young person, this can make things tricky, argues Sonia Blandford, CEO at Achievement for All. “There are so many layers in the systems and we tend to focus on what we know and understand,” she says. “There used to be an overarching record of every child – now we have information in silos. This means that our system responses are a hindrance.”

Siloed information and little shared understanding makes joining the dots in a multi-agency scenario very challenging. “In order to improve we need to keep it simple,” adds Sonia. “At the moment there are too many layers.”

It’s a point that Shaun Brown, programme director at The Difference, agrees with. “We need in place a chronology and understanding of children, especially vulnerable ones who will come into contact with youth offending services,” he says. “This is hindered by a misplaced fear of protecting privacy. When we restrict access to past information, we see only current information devoid of context. This leaves vulnerable children moving in and out of scope with their chronology becoming disconnected. When this happens, understanding gets lost and we are left constantly restarting the journey of each child. The way things are at the moment, the system response is geared towards single threads of need.”

Painting a clear picture and providing a holistic view to the professionals involved would represent a major step forward in improving outcomes for those young people in contact with youth offending services.

A system response which hinders the process of improving outcomes for young people in the youth justice system feeds into the wider notion around institutional trauma, something which many vulnerable children experience in the existing school system.

The notion of assessments has failure built into it.” argues Sonia. “We need to consider this carefully as assessments are constantly telling a lot of children that they are always bottom of the pile. That represents institutional trauma.”

Another aspect to the institutional response to these children is the school process of fixed term and permanent exclusions. “For some 14- and 15-year olds, the first time that are being diagnosed with severe educational disabilities is during the screening process with a youth offending team. Why? Because of school exclusions,” says Marius Frank, strategic lead for E-learning development and youth justice at Achievement for All. “This is driven by high stakes assessments and a results driven system. There is hope, however, since schools can build out different systems and curricula for their children. They can justify this to Ofsted and make a change.”

A more joined up, integrated approach across the various systems that young people meet would help. “I’m a big advocate of youth offending teams,” says Alex Chard, director at YCTS. “They host a wealth of information so can pick up on many different factors. They can recognise the history of a child. The number of looked after children in the criminal justice system tells its own story of societal discrimination.”

Youth offending teams are ideally positioned to provide valuable insights to other areas of the overarching system that looks after and monitors children. All professionals and bodies are doing their best, but a more integrated approach would ultimately benefit the children involved by helping to improve their outcomes.

How CACI helped Direct Line Group (DLG) successfully migrate to new infrastructure

How CACI helped Direct Line Group (DLG) successfully migrate to new infrastructure

BACKGROUND

When Direct Line Group (DLG) separated from the Royal Bank of Scotland, it needed a way to migrate all of its services and digital assets to a new infrastructure securely, efficiently, and within a tight deadline. 

THE CHALLENGE

  • Establish a secure new infrastructure for DLG’s data and services 
  • Securely migrate data from the infrastructure previously shared with RBS 
  • Complete the migration quickly, with minimal downtime. 

THE SOLUTION

  • A team of eight CACI Network Engineers, Consultants and Service Delivery Managers helped DLG migrate to a new iSNP (Interim Secure Network Perimeter). This was a mission critical piece of security infrastructure which allowed for RBS hosted applications to continue to be consumed by 12,000 DLG employees (including RBS desktops) and for data to be transferred as part of the migration activity between RBS and the new DLG data centres. 
  • Working alongside the core IT staff within DLG and other key suppliers, all aspects of network implementation and management were taken care of 
  • Full support before, during and after the migration 
  • A dedicated team of CACI experts remains both on-site and remotely to manage the new infrastructure. 

THE RESULTS

  • DLG laid the foundation for a successful digital future 
  • The migration was completed quickly, avoiding potential fees from RBS 
  • A secure network perimeter was established, which has been running since 2013 
  • The CACI team has helped DLG with multiple other challenges – reaching out further into the business and helping the organisation master its network and data. 

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 CONTACT US

To learn more about migrating to new infrastructure or find out how CACI can help, get in touch today.