Standardising a healthcare portfolio to ensure best practice
Our client is a private health care operator with more than 40 hospitals and specialist health care centres across UK treating 200,000 patients each year. The UK private healthcare market was estimated to be worth $11.8bn in 2018 and is poised to grow at CAGR of 2.6% between 2019 to 2025.
Our client faced the issue of an estate of facilities that had historically operated as autonomous business operations, with vastly different data and systems throughout the portfolio.
This limited operational effectiveness and efficiency.
This diverse array of systems lacked a clear, consistent interface with the NHS and other health services, despite the majority of business originating from the NHS itself.
The website offered no online access for simple appointment booking and the lack of a dedicated CRM system meant all booking and scheduling was done in a diversity of local systems or even offline via spreadsheets. At a time of intense growth and increased demand for healthcare, this lack of systems meant that our client could not assess capacity or give an accurate figure on the allocation of resources, or the availability of a given service.
This inability to analyse service capability led to not only inconsistent services at different facilities, but also a huge demand for personnel to create reports for the business decision-makers, manually transferring data into a single system.
Lastly, this fragmented business model had demanded that training of staff was delivered on site. This created a substantial lag in upskilling team members (especially those clinical staff who need regular training and skills assessments / updates). It also necessitated a large training team
Appointed by the client IT Director, BML Digital set about implementing a consistent, single technology platform for the entire portfolio of properties and head office. This included:
1
A single connection with the NHS that then fed out to the entire estate
2
The implementation of a standardised technology landscape built around a consistent, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) application
3
Consistent licensing and procurement across all facilities
4
The creation of a website with secure patient login and access that enabled appointment booking
5
The implementation of a company-wide e-learning tool linked to HR management and resource scheduling
As a result of this programme, our client has realised a range of benefits, including:
1
The removal of large burdens on the reception team and substantially more efficient patient booking and reception functions
2
The ability to divert the reporting team (previously ten people) on to higher value, patient administration and customer service tasks
3
Financial savings from standard procurement processes and a centralised licensing function
4
The ability to harvest best practice from across the portfolio of properties and build on industry-leading activities
Following the COVID19 pandemic our client is now well positioned to handle an increased number of patients whilst delivering world-class healthcare throughout the UK.