NHS trusts start trial of shared finance system

The first pilot sites for an NHS trial of centralised finance systems start to go live this week.

The Shared Service Centres (SSC) in Leeds and Bristol will process all financial transactions for the 46 health organisations in West Yorkshire and the South West - a combined annual turnover of £4.6bn.

The first trusts will be moved onto the centralised systems this week and the pilots will be fully live by October. The systems are supplied by Torex using Oracle 11i software.

The £25m project could save the NHS £180m a year on administrative overheads, according to the NHS Shared Services Taskforce (SST).

The target is to save 40 per cent of trusts' costs, says David Thorpe, managing director of the West Yorkshire SSC.

'Savings will be on overheads such as administration, systems maintenance, and staff, and also on things like audit fees because we will only need to audit once instead of on a trust-by-trust basis,' he said.

The project will also reduce audit fees, because all trusts can be audited together, instead of individually.

'We are also hoping individual finance teams will be able to focus on management elements.

'Rather than spending time on routine jobs they can take more strategic role and focus on their value-added roles,' he said.

The SST teams will ensure the system delivers the same quality of service as individual trusts were providing. A customer relationship manager has been put in place to oversee the relationship with trusts.

A key challenge has been developing the business processes, says Thorpe.

'Without standard processes you can't translate them into standard systems,' he said.

The pilots were originally due to go live last autumn but progress was delayed to allow time for more testing.

The success of the pilot will be independently evaluated by the Department of Health. Based on those findings, it will decide whether to roll the system out nationally.