Ashford and St Peter’s NHS
Securing Income and Improving Accuracy
Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is the largest provider of acute hospital services in Surrey, serving a population of over 380,000. The Trust has huge volumes of activity, typically invoicing for several hundred thousand attendances.
THE CHALLENGE
For NHS trusts, reference data is typically sourced manually from multiple websites and external organisations. To keep on top of all the necessary data updates requires downloading hundreds of files on a regular basis. Because this is such a time-consuming process it wasn’t being done and the Trust was using outdated lookup data.
Ashford and St Peter’s was also receiving hundreds of “data challenges” a month from its main commissioner, many of which were a result of an incorrect lookup from GP Practice to CCG. As a result, the finance department would spend around a week every month trying to make sure their invoices were going to the correct CCGs. Clearly, this was not a cost-effective use of their time.
Head of Information Assurance, Jenny Church, says,
“I have worked in NHS Information for almost 30 years, and maintaining up-to-date reference data is always a big challenge.”
“I have worked in NHS Information for almost 30 years, and maintaining up-to-date reference data is always a big challenge.”
THE SOLUTION
UK Healthcare Dimensions (UKHD) from CACI provides Ashford and St Peter’s with all the codes they need in one system. This includes the NHS Data Dictionary national value reference tables, as well as complete and historic OPCS, ICD10 and other coding schemes. It also supplies all of the organisational data from TRUD, including NHS organisations and postcodes.
The Trust receives the tables in an SQL database, which integrates seamlessly into their local data warehouse. The tables are used both by the automatic processes as part of the data warehouse nightly build and also to validate their data for both income and SUS submissions.
Because UKHD is supplied as a pre-populated database, implementation was quick and effortless. The Trust installed a package to enable access and received a password to log in. The process was complete in a matter of minutes.
The annual subscription is extremely affordable and training is included in the price.
"We don’t need much support as UKHD is really easy to use and very reliable, but whenever we do have any queries they get answered quickly”.
Jenny Church.
THE BENEFITS
UKHD is a valuable part of the Trust’s SUS submission and SLAM feeds, which means their income is dependent upon it. Using the tool has increased invoice accuracy and dramatically cut the number of challenges received from CCGs.
Because the CCGs and the CSUs all use UKHD, Ashford and St Peter’s can always be confident of their position when there is a dispute over invoice details. The Trust is now confident that it is using the most up-to-date information and can easily resolve any issues with the commissioning bodies.
The Trust is now planning to use UKHD to ensure that all the active patients they have on their PAS system are registered with current GP practices. They will be able to compare every practice they have against active patients and check whether the practices still exist.
“My colleagues in Finance were doing an enormous amount of manual work to make sure invoices were always going to the right place. We’ve now got to the stage where they are only doing a few hours each month, rather than days and days. All of our BI team also now rely on UKHD for different reference data tables. It has become integral to the department’s work.”
Jenny ChurchHead of Information Assurance, Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust