Oxford Health save time and funding through detailed data analysis

Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust operates across a large region of the South West of England providing physical, mental health and social care.

As a valued customer of CACI, we spoke to Head of Costing, Paul Vincent about some of the challenges his team faced and the improvements they’ve made through effective use of their costing solution Synergy 4.

Tackling time challenges

The teams at Oxford Health were burdened with time consuming cost calculations that could only be produced at a high level – nowhere near their requirements for team and patient level activity-based costing.

Due to the work involved, Paul describes the costing process as being too admin heavy.

“Most of the costings were produced using excel and time was spent processing the data rather than analysing the data.”
Paul Vincent, Head of Costing, Oxford Health

When CACI were appointed, a key deliverable was to implement a solution that allowed Oxford Health to focus on data analysis in order to take actions to improve apportionment and allocation of money, as well as to kick start improving activity data by identifying gaps or lack of recording.

Implementing the right solution

In order to meet the core requirements of an efficient alternative to costing calculations, as well as providing opportunities to analyse the data and gain insight, CACI’s proposed solution was Synergy4.

An NHSI Healthcare Costing Standards compliant, patient level costing solution for end-to-end reporting and management.

As one of the hurdles Oxford Health was facing was that they weren’t able to report at a detailed level, Synergy would help the trust overcome this challenge by allowing activity to be costed at the lowest level and mapping to the trust’s own user defined hierarches to produce the outputs they needed.

Paul told us this is aspect has proven to be key for Oxford Health.

“The amount of detail that we can cost is extremely useful, if the activity data is robust, as we can cost by different criteria e.g. Referring GP and GP Practice, Consultant, Member of Staff that carried out the consultation, age and many more.”
Paul Vincent, Head of Costing, Oxford Health

Outcomes for Oxford Health

Since the implementation of Synergy4 Oxford Health have seen a number of improvements. The time saved on manual processing of the data mean they are now able to focus on data analysis and turn the insights into actions within the trust that directly impact funding.

Paul explains:

“It is now easy to produce costing data by commissioner using patient activity data and we can therefore calculate if a contract is in surplus or deficit. This has helped us as a Trust to negotiate with our main commissioner for further funding. We can also compare costs by geographical areas for the same service using clinical team or postcode.”
Paul Vincent, Head of Costing, Oxford Health

Oxford Health continue work with CACI to maximise the benefits of Synergy and generate insights that help improve outcomes for staff and patients across the trust.