Healthcare at Home Chooses Ascent Relationship Management

UK high-tech homecare provider, Healthcare at Home Ltd, has chosen Ascent relationship management (RM), supplied by Ascent Technology, to provide it with an integrated customer relationship management system.

Ascent will be used to provide an enterprise-wide patient relationship management system which will truly put the patient at the heart of Healthcare at Home’s business. The new system will be integrated with the existing Sage CS/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, also supplied by Ascent Technology, to form the hub of an integrated IT system.

The new fully integrated system will be used by Healthcare at Home to streamline business processes particularly in the supply of pharmaceutical products, and nursing services.

Patient details will be held in Ascent, linked into the ERP system, providing data about insurance, prescription and treatment details and include attached documents such as medical reports.

Ascent will also be used to schedule activities for patients such as a visit by a nurse or despatch of medical supplies from Healthcare at Home’s national distribution centre.

Additional benefits of the new enterprise-wide relationship management system should include more efficient invoicing of patients, by drawing patient details and amount of homecare received directly from Ascent, and pricing and service codes from the Sage CS/3 ERP system.

Healthcare at Home’s financial director, Graham White described the Ascent relationship management product from Ascent technology as "the missing piece of the jigsaw" in providing an integrated customer-focused IT system.

“Ascent will consolidate all patient information to which permitted staff will have access, maintaining patient confidentiality,” added White. "Our nurses will find it much easier to generate valuable clinical reports required by GPs, consultants and hospitals to monitor our level of care and patients’ acceptance and responsiveness to prescribed treatments."

Ascent Technology already has 40 UK-based customers in the pharmaceutical and medical devices sectors, including Adams Healthcare and Albert Browne. “We have relationship management products configured for the pharmaceutical and medical devices market,” Phil Crothers, marketing manager with Ascent Technology told EHM. "We are addressing the mid-market that we don’t think is being addressed well by larger firms like Siebel."

In addition to developing and marketing its own-brand Ascent applications for customer relationship management/relationship management, workflow and people management, Ascent technology also provides solutions to customers making use of major third party applications such as SAP R/3 and Sage Enterprise ERP software. Ascent was the first UK company to become a Microsoft Gold certified partner for software products and is the largest UK re-seller of Sage software.