Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust
About
Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust is a large and busy teaching hospital that employs over 4.500 employees and cares for an average of 400.000 people a year.
Challenge
Management and staff at Salford Royal are passionate about quality and patient safety and have recognised the need for greater transparency of what is really driving performance and costs across the Trust. To obtain more reliable and credible management information that could provide better understanding of both the income and cost of patients' treatments, Salford Royal appointed Prodacapo's partner Bellis-Jones, Hill to support their implementation of Service Line Reporting and Patient Level Costing using the Prodacapo software.
"Salford is on a journey to be the best hospital and to ensure it provides quality and safe services at the most efficient cost. The use of Service Line Reporting is seen as a vital part of the delivery of that agenda", says Stephen Kennedy, Deputy Director of Finance, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust.
The process
Prodacapo produces Service Line Reporting and Patient Level Costing information for both management and clinicians to help obtain real insight into performance and profitability and provides an objective basis for identifying opportunities for improvement. It allows Salford Royal to deep-dive into its own performance and provides patient episode level costs that help better understand the factors that influence patient outcomes, performance and profitability by specialty, consultant and point of delivery.
The implementation at Salford Royal has also included Prodacapo Service Line Performance Management, a Balanced Scorecard that measures performance against targets and plans across the Trust at all levels from Board level to ward level.
"As a part of our overall Quality Strategy, we now have a comprehensive system that provides the degree of information accuracy required for our management team and clinicians to take important strategic and operational decisions with real confidence", says Tony Whitfield, Finance Director and Deputy Chief Executive, Salford Royal.
Results
More accurate and more comprehensive patient data is now available to clinicians and managers who are engaged in the further development and use of the Prodacapo tool. This encourages more objective analysis, dialogue and debate about the provision of service and the management of the Trust and its individual specialities.
For example, good theatre utilisation is one of the keys to successful performance in any Trust. In this instance, Service Line Reports and Patient Level Costing information highlighted the need to look at theatre utilisation much more holistically and to recognise the complexity inherent in good theatre performance.
Similarly, the cost of radiology scans was previously heavily influenced by Korner weightings that were used in the previous approach to Reference Costing. The same weightings had therefore been used to underpin the early development of Service Line Reports and the Patient Level Costing at Salford Royal.
However, the resulting costs of radiology scans seemed to be counter-intutive - certain scans seemed very expensive, while complex scans for in-patients seemed relatively inexpensive. This could have posed a problem to the Trust if the charging for radiology scans was based on such data. However, closer examination by clinicians and managers together quickly highlighted the fact that Korner weightings are now insufficient to reflect what is really driving the cost of patient scans and a more sophisticated approach was required.
The result is that the simple scans are now charged at a much lower price to reflect the lower work content while the more complex scans, often for in-patients, are charged at a higher price so that the real financial cost of providing treatment is reflected more accurately.
This is just a small illustration of how Service Line Reporting and Patient Level Costing information is driving a deeper understanding of performance and finanical management across the Trust at Salford Royal.
Prodacapo is updated quarterly to coincide with Board reporting and there are sixty clinicians and managers across the Trust with direct access to this information for analysis and decision making.
More information
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