NHS could save £5bn with business discovery technology, says medical chief

Chief executive of Cambridge University Hospitals says he has saved 25 per cent of his bed capacity in four years with the technology

The NHS could save itself £5bn if business discovery technology were deployed in every hospital, according to Dr Gareth Goodier, chief executive of Cambridge University Hospitals.

Goodier, who decided to implement a business discovery tool called QlikView four years ago, said that as a result the 1,200-bed trust had secured savings equivalent to more than 25 per cent of its bed capacity over that time.

If this were extrapolated to all the hospitals in the NHS, it could potentially make £5bn in savings.

The trust has paid £1m for 1,000 licences over the four years since it began using the technology; the hospital currently has 7,000 staff in total.

All 500 consultants have access, as have a further 500 senior and middle managers.

The technology is able to pull information out of the hospital's 43 IT systems and analyse it according to hundreds of metrics. It can also provide cost, financial, HR and capacity details.

This data provides managers with the ability to optimise bed use because processes and outcomes can be compared with those of other hospitals or countries. Staff will know where they should complete same-day operations or follow the best pathways for treatments.

"The system allows us to see where there is wastage, and allows staff to approach medicine as if they were business process engineers. There are key parameters that need to be met with different sorts of treatment. For example, a patient with a broken femur should be in theatre within 12 hours and should see a physio 48 hours after surgery. They can be out of hospital within four days. The technology can prompt each stage of the process. Some hospitals take 28 days to treat the same condition.

"The technology also allows us to really focus on our outcomes - and each step involved in achieving them. It really allows us to tighten our processes," said Goodier.

"In addition, the data can be presented like a hotel bill in terms of costs. A patient's stay can be broken down to a minute level with all X-rays, CT scans, theatre visits, drugs, prosthetics and so on included."

Goodier describes the 43 other IT systems as "cast iron and steam driven", with the earliest dating back to 1993. The hospital is in the process of replacing these. The data is drawn into the system and accessible via a web browser which is located at the nurses' station.