Case study
How Synergy revitalised Dorset HealthCare’s costing team
Summary
Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust offers a range of mental health and physical health services to people of all ages from children to elderly. These services are delivered in both hospital and community-based settings.
The costing team at Dorset HealthCare has long used CACI’s patient-level costing solution, Synergy, to reach various goals due to its high-quality outputs and proven abilities in easing the National Cost Collection submission process. According to Chris Badminton, Head of Income & Costing at Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust, “I couldn’t see how another provider could compare with its capabilities.”
Company size
7,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Services used
Products used
Challenge
As long-time Synergy users, Dorset HealthCare’s costing team knew that CACI’s patient level costing solution would help them navigate their most pressing challenges, such as:
Acquiring the necessary patient level costing information that would inform decision-making about clinical care at Dorset HealthCare, which had been exceedingly difficult.
The team was previously equipped with indecipherable data. It was input manually into spreadsheets and could not supply the necessary intelligence to overcome hurdles. “Without Synergy4, we’d never be able to generate outputs to support the challenges that we faced,” Chris explained.
They struggled to get results out to stakeholders or present the results in a dashboard format that could be shared internally.
Limited engagement from the necessary stakeholders became a blocker when trying to make the most of data and tools available to the costing team.
Solution
Overall, the costing team’s evolution as a result of Synergy has been, as Chris stated, “over and above”.
“The speed of [Synergy] and the way that you can calculate and produce results is phenomenal… including its usability and how intuitive it is,” Chris continued. “It’s above what we would’ve expected.”
Equipped with Synergy data, Dorset HealthCare’s costing team is now developing analysis to support decision making for their improved access to psychological therapies (IAPT) service. Currently, the data that Chris has presented back to the organisation through Synergy is being deciphered, and the costing team is finding ways to reiterate the analyses for other areas of the Trust.
“I think [this service] is going to become something that is rolled out across all services within our mental health function to enhance the care that an individual could receive,” Chris explained. “It’s on the cusp of becoming something big for good evidence that has been supported by Synergy.”
Outcomes/Future
Going forward, Dorset HealthCare hope to receive a regular analysis that can be used across the organisation to guide the way that clinical care at Dorset Healthcare should be delivered and further improve patient outcomes. Not only would a regular analysis enhance patient experiences, but it would also encourage the costing team’s conscious, intelligent allocation and spending of funds.
In the meantime, the costing team will continue focusing their efforts on health inequalities. They are currently looking into deprivation data, a process that involves manually exporting data from government and other websites to generate data that can be compared against or linked to existing patient level activity data used for Dorset HealthCare’s costing submissions and costing reports. The goal is that the costing team will eventually be able to use or link the data to compare results to other NHS organisations. This would help them better understand what a patient’s pathway looks like, the costs associated with specific types of care and how Dorset HealthCare can learn from other organisations to apply best practices to their own.
