Driving service line improvements at Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust

Long standing CACI customer, Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust, provides a range of community and in-patient mental health services, learning disability services, community services, children’s and addictions services to people living in Hull, the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Yorkshire.

We spoke to Costing Manager Clare Jacklin and Costing Accountant Adam Copley to understand how they are using CACI’s financial insight solution Synergy, to help drive change across their service lines.

Synergy to overcome costing challenges

In order to obtain business insights, it’s imperative for teams be able to easily work with all the data they need, at the point in time they need it.

One of the early challenges the Humber costing team faced was manually managing large volumes of data with limited functionality. This in turn meant they could only get a very high-level view of the business. Clare and her team knew that they needed a solution that would provide them with specifics on patients and the ability to slice costs into smaller chunks which would show them the impact of changing one element rather than everything.

Alongside the need to get a more granular view on their data, the costing team knew they would need a future proofed solution that could meet their requirements to complete the mandated mental health submissions when they came into effect.

After speaking with the CACI team about these developing requirements, Humber decided to upgrade their solution to CACI’s end to end NHS costing reporting and management solution Synergy4.

“The biggest thing for us as a CACI customer” explains Clare, “has been taking some of the things to more detailed and granular level, more than other trusts have done so far, with the way that we allocate pay and resources. CACI’s Synergy team worked with us to achieve that”

The Synergy4 upgrade, supports the Humber team from day one and importantly on an ongoing basis for all future National Cost submissions changes.

“Coming from a mental health and community services side of things, many of the tools out there have historically been fairly acute based. But working with CACI on Synergy, rather than being given a solution for acute trusts, we’re able to develop what we need for mental health and it answers the questions that we have in these areas”

Improving the submissions process

One clear priority for the costing team is to be able to complete the submissions process as efficiently as possible, with confidence that your data is accurate.

Adam Copley (Costing Account for Humber) gives us his view on how Synergy4, along with its embedded market leading analytics, is supporting them through their submissions:

“The calculations and the process overall is so much quicker. With Synergy4 I can do 2 calculations a day, so when you’re up against it, trying to get submissions in, the ability to do multiple calculations in a short timeframe is really helpful. It allows you to quickly make a change and see how that change impacts everything else.”

He adds how the addition of embedded analytics has enabled them to quickly identify outliers and rectify issues,

“With the Qlik Sense dashboard there’s added output from what you put into the model, so it’s easier to reconcile what’s in there, and check that what you’ve put in, allocation methods and the rules you’ve put in are working in the way you expected, we’re able to interrogate a lot more.”

Using Synergy to impact patient delivery

Since the latest developments in Synergy4, the costing team at Humber have been able to produce reports and analysis that feed into various projects, departments, and will ultimately impact how services are delivered and improved.

Clare shares some details about how costing data extracted from Synergy4 and integrating with analytics and reporting is already being used for a number of improvements.

“The latest Synergy4 development has really helped us. The advancements around Qlik Sense and how we can extract data from Synergy4 enables us to use it in PowerBi.”

She goes on to say “We can now use our data for small projects around things like frequent flyers, where we work with acute trusts, looking at the costs of patients that come back to you time and time again, and using that data and insight we can work out service redesign. In this particular case we were able to provide the costs of specific patients, and support and input that information into the project team that redesigned the liaison services that we had within the trust. Being able to redesign a service like that improves what we deliver to patients.”

What is next for Humber?

Through use of Synergy4 and PowerBi, the team have developed reports for service users that they hope to soon be rolling out across the trust. These reports have been specifically designed with the aim of informing the service decision making.

“We’re going to be reporting on the cost of delivering care to specific types of patients and services and combine that with the ability to dice that by age of patient or type of care that they are receiving” Clare describes, “Plus, the ability to fulfil all of these reporting requests a lot quicker than we’ve ever been able to do before should help our decision making process”

Adam adds “Once we start rolling out these reports and continue to inform changes and improvements (which helps improve our costing even more), this in turn should help us achieve further buy in from other sources within the trust”

With increasing engagement from departments around the trust, CACI’s business insights team are partnering closely with Humber to continually evolve Synergy.

“The team are still working with us to continue to develop some of the things we want to be able to do in the future. So, Synergy isn’t an out of the box solution, CACI take you on the journey with them to continuously improve the product, so it works better for all of us.”

The future of how Humber’s services lines are delivered and how they can be improved, is supporting by the costing data and analysis obtained through use of Synergy and the trust’s other business intelligence tools.