Empowering finance is the key to achieving value from NHS National Cost Collection

Do you have full control of your PLICS solution?

Historically, NHS organisations have prioritised compliance and chosen their Patient Level Information and Costing System (PLICS) based on confidence in compliance and the capability of the solution to deliver the specified data and reports for national analysis.

But as Trusts recognise how resource and time-intensive it can be to provide this mandatary data, there’s a need to think more broadly about what makes for an effective process. And the PLICS system you choose is at the heart of this.

High-maintenance solutions create bottlenecks

Many Trusts find that their solution is high maintenance. If it doesn’t have a user-friendly front-end, IT staff must submit a request to the IT team or the third-party vendor every time they want to make a change or update models or the data structure.

It’s often slow, expensive and difficult to get adaptations actioned by others, particularly if they have other internal priorities. Meanwhile, inconsistent or inaccurate data is compromising the Trust’s ongoing reporting. While the finance team is occupied with negotiations for relatively simple updates, they’re missing opportunities to add real value by focusing on performance improvement insights revealed by analytics.

NHS Trust finance teams want to take matters into their own hands and foster a spirit of innovation and self-sufficiency. If the PLICS system is built around an intuitive user interface, they can dive in and take ownership of every aspect of patient level costing analytics and modelling without relying on anyone else.

Discover 8 ways that NHS trusts are achieving value from their costing outputs in our new white paper

Some Trusts have found a way to foster self-sufficiency

Trust finance teams need a user-friendly system with an intuitive user interface, that’s built to enable adaptation within a secure and compliant framework. That’s the best way to empower the finance team to take full control of data and analytics to produce tailored, relevant reports.

CACI’s Synergy 4 is designed to balance robust compliance and stability with user empowerment. Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust is just one NHS organisation that’s reaping the benefits to deliver improved services and patient care. As their Costing Manager, Clare Jacklin, explains: “We’re reporting on the cost of delivering care to specific types of patients and services and combining that with the ability to dice that by age of patient or type of care that they are receiving. We can fulfil all of these reporting requests a lot quicker than we’ve ever been able to do before, which helps our decision-making process.”

Like to know more about empowering your team to get the most from PLICS? Take a look at our new NHS insight paper: Are you getting the most out of your Patient Level Costing data?

The paper describes how Trust finance teams are using CACI’s Synergy 4 to achieve tangible performance improvements and better patient outcomes through an empowered approach to reporting.