Case study
Somerset NHS Foundation Trust chooses Synergy as its costing solution
Summary
Somerset NHS Foundation trust (SFT) is the first trust on the English mainland to provide community, mental health and acute hospital services. We spoke to Peter Fry, Head of Costing and SLR, about the recent trust changes and how Synergy is helping them join up their costing data.
In 2017, Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust formed an alliance designed to support a close working relationship between the two trusts. Later that year, the trusts moved to working from a single, joined up set of objectives that spanned across all services.
As this approach progressed and colleagues reported on the benefit gained from working in this way, they sought to go a step further and formally merge. This came to fruition in April 2020, where the trusts merged to become Somerset Foundation NHS Trust.
Prior to the merger, Peter had come from working on the mental health and community costing side at Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation trust. Since the merger he is now is working with an income and costing team of six, which works across all services (acute, mental health and community) and cover costing, service line reporting (SLR), contract and reporting.
Company size
14,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
Choosing a system
Initially, both trusts had been using different costing solutions. A decision had to be made on a sole solution to take them forward.
Peter explains: “When we merged and we were considering which solution to go with, during our search we spoke to a lot of other trusts who told us their stories around how they were using CACI’s recent developments in Synergy and the good experience and improvements they were able to make through using it”.
There were a number of factors that impacted the decision to elect CACI and Synergy as their costing solution, and flexibility with complex data, was a high priority on the list.
Solution
Peter goes on to describe the benefit, both technically and financially, for the costing team of being able to develop and build in Synergy.
“We’ve got a really good costing team in house, so we weren’t looking for a provider who would go away and do all of the work for us. In addition to the high costs involved of a provider doing it all for us, we wanted to build it ourselves so we know how it works, and when we share the data with people we know how each and every cost has been arrived at, and can communicate that effectively. So, when we sat down to review which solution to go with, it was very clear that Synergy was the logical decision and would work better with our requirements”.
Finally, Peter talks about how the outputs from Synergy will become extremely important in the coming months and so this was also a big factor when choosing a solution.
“The output is also something that’s really important, and the ability to output data into other front end analytics solutions like Power BI, means Synergy delivers even more value and cost savings to the trust – none of the other providers we were looking at could do that. This also means, as our information team already use Power BI, we’re not having to force others to use a different tool in order to look at our costs.”
Results
“My team really enjoys using Synergy. We’re still developing our costing model to reflect what we’re doing as a trust, and we’re looking forward to the outputs we want to get out of it and how we can use those going forwards”
Other aspects such as training received and the interaction with the CACI customer care team, have meant Peter’s costing team, who don’t come from a costing background, have been able to hit the ground running.
