West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust has deployed Ardentia's Activity Flow Analytics solution to get full visibility of patient referral patterns from local practices, improve business reporting and to help maximise its income.
The Activity Flow Analytics (AFA) solution is a fully-hosted service that needs no implementation. It provides data from any referrer and provider, showing where patients were referred to a hospital from, and the hospital or clinic that they have been referred to.
Managers at West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust were confident that they knew where their referrals were coming from, but wanted to have a method for verifying referral data to support robust business planning across all services. After assessing the available solutions, the Trust chose Ardentia's AFA.
Gareth Corser, West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust's Director of Strategy said: "The AFA solution allows us to track and assess our referral patterns accurately, and confirm our market position. It's useful when monitoring border areas - the towns and villages on the edge of our catchment, as these often have a wider range of referral choices for patients.
"The solution has been particularly successful in helping us to understand changing referral patterns to support corporate business planning processes. The Trust's Business Manager attends clinical meetings to discuss referral patterns with clinicians and helps them to understand changes in referral patterns. AFA has proven to be instrumental in helping us to use our resources in the most effective way, to improve income, quality of care and value for money."
According to Gareth Corser, AFA was chosen for its in-depth reporting capabilities, and its competitive pricing against alternative solutions. As AFA is a hosted service, deployment and set-up was quick and straightforward.
Ardentia's AFA has an intuitive, browser-based GUI that visualises and geographically maps referral volumes, and enables clinicians to drill down into referral data by speciality, HRG, location, patient age and gender, and period. This helps in understanding referral flows and case mixes in detail, and supports analysis of how these patterns change over time.
It helps healthcare providers answer questions such as where local GP practices refer specific cases and why, with additional detailed data on how referral patterns and case mixes change over time.
For more details on Ardentia's Activity Flow Analytics solution, visit:
http://www.ardentia.co.uk/solution/activity-flow-analytics/
About Ardentia
Ardentia is the leading dedicated supplier of healthcare solutions in the UK. We work at every level of the health service, including Trusts and PCTs among our clients, as well as SHAs and National organisations. This means that our team has unrivalled experience in delivering highly effective business information services to healthcare organisations.
Our aim is to provide those responsible for healthcare, whether they are managers or clinicians, the tools they need for evidence-based management.
That is the best way to ensure that healthcare is delivered to the highest standards of quality and as cost-effectively as possible.