West Suffolk uses Ardentia for workflow

West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust has deployed Ardentia’s Activity Flow Analytics to get better visibility of patient referral patterns from local practices, improve business reporting and help to maximise its income.

AFA is a fully-hosted service that provides data from any referrer and provider, showing where patients were referred from, and the hospital or clinic that they were referred to.

Trust managers were confident they knew where their referrals were coming from, but wanted to have a method for verifying referral data to support business planning.

Director of strategy Gareth Corser, 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 AFA has a 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.

Corser added: "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.”

Link: Ardentia: Activity Flow Analytics solution