University Hospitals Leicester
Supporting the strategic vision
The Challenge...
University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL) is one of the biggest and busiest NHS Trusts in the country, incorporating the Leicester General, Glenfield and Royal Infirmary hospitals. The Trust also runs its own Children’s Hospital and one of the country’s leading heart centres.
Improving quality and safety is at the centre of  the Trust’s five year strategic vision, ‘Caring at its best’, a vision that relies on transformation and the creation of new, innovative services. Faced with making 5% in efficiency savings year on year, whilst maintaining the best possible levels of care and supporting the new strategic vision, makes the effective monitoring of costs and clinical performance critical. To do so effectively relies upon having the very best support systems in place to collect, monitor and report on this information.
To that end, UHL decided to procure a Patient Level Information and Costing System (PLICS) that would deliver the granularity of patient level data it needed to support service improvement and its five year strategic vision. Importantly, UHL also needed clinicians to have direct access to this information so that they could monitor their own performance and understand their contribution to profit and loss of each service.
The Solution...
Following a tender process, UHL selected Synergy Costing from CACI, a PLICS solution that provides over 400 users across the Trust with dir
ect access to financial and clinical activity data. Users, including senior Clinicians, Divisional Business Unit Managers, Finance Managers and Analysts access this data using QlikView business discovery dashboards, a tool that provides information in an easy to use format with the ability to drill into underlying data.
"We’re now well on our way to supporting our new future strategy, simply through the improvements we have made to costing and service delivery. We really couldn’t have asked more from the product."
Simon Sheppherd, Deputy Director of Finance & Procurement
Results and benefits...
The Trust can now easily compare service line profitability on a monthly basis and provide comparative patient level costing and income information at the click of a button. Clinicians are able to directly view how clinical activity contributes to profit and loss, whilst also benchmarking performance with their peers. The new solution is also being used to monitor cost improvement targets and more easily review clinical coding practices.
The benefits to UHL have been wide–spread and significant. The Trust can provide Clinical Business Units with direct access to patient level costing data, identify efficiencies, and deliver real improvements in cost reduction and quality of care. Opening up information access has also enabled greater clinical engagement, the result of which has included improvements to clinical coding practices and changes to the model of clinical care which have helped to generate millions of pounds of efficiency savings.
"Clinical engagement used to be a major issue for us but once the clinicians were able to access information about their own patient activity (both income and cost), they soon realised how beneficial it was to understand the financial aspect of treating patients."
Simon Sheppard, Deputy Director of Finance and Procurement