It’s easy enough to see why accurate, timely income management is essential to the running of any NHS trust: no amount of goodwill and appreciation of the importance of the work is enough to pay the bills. It’s also easy enough to see why it’s a difficult process: data comes in wildly different forms and has to be pushed through inflexible pricing software. Practitioners have to juggle spreadsheets, bespoke scripts, and disconnected databases and spend countless hours tackling coding issues, correcting for data quality issues, fixing mapping errors, and addressing commissioner challenges. But foregoing this is not an option: it is like pleading for pennies; trusts simply have to jump through these hoops to get paid.
In an ideal world, there would be a free moment to take a step back and redesign the income process. Allowing trusts to be proactive, rather than reactive. Making use of technology to cut out most of the manual steps involved. The only aspect of this that sounds implausible is the part where there would be a free moment for this. The technical part is actually not that far-fetched.
Drawing on our many years of experience, we’ve identified some main bottlenecks that need addressing for a much smoother process.
One of the key sources of complexity in a modern Income process is the need to handle a wide range of data sources that will require significant processing between when they come out of their original sources and when they can be priced as healthcare products.
What is needed is streamlined data loading and processing workflows that can ingest data from whatever sources it exists in at your trust. It needs to be format agnostic, so no time is spent on translating data from one type into another.
A black box is never helpful, especially not if your income depends on what happens in the process. And particularly if you are not always confident the data quality is up to par. You want to be in control and trust the outcomes by having robust data validation in place.
Another uncertainty that needs resolving is the financial effects of changes to aspects such as pricing rules, flex-freeze settings and contracts. Being able to know upfront what happens to the bottom-line allows for data-driven decision-making.
On the upside: when the challenges are clear, the solution is often near. This is no exception. The technical solution is already here in LOGEX Income. All you need now, is a free moment to look into it…