Intelligent Process Improvement (iPI)
Targeted improvement is more important than ever.
In an NHS needing to deliver against increasing expectations of quality and care, in the context of constrained budgets, health system leaders need to have confidence that improvement programmes will deliver the changes required to release real savings and reduce inefficiencies, and do it quickly. The picture is made more urgent by the policy objective of system reform, a move to integrated healthcare and pressures to avoid bringing in external support. intelligent Process Improvement (iPI) helps trusts to meet these challenges, enabling you to make real process improvements that deliver rapid, tangible results.
How do you target your process improvement?
The £20bn efficiency savings required by 2014 translate to a requirement of around 4% annual productivity gains year-on-year. With increasing patient choice and competition it is clear that cost cutting efforts will need to be robustly supported by quality and efficiency gains. Some of this will be about greater alignment and coherence of major programmes such as FT application, CIP and QIPP initiatives, but a vital part, as other industries have experienced, will be process improvement.
The problem is, in a complex NHS trust, how do you know where to start in order to achieve the fastest return on investment and greatest impact on service quality? In today’s world of ‘big data’, it’s not just big business that can use information about organisational performance and population (customer) behaviour to become more productive and competitive. Intelligent insight, based on a real understanding of how your organisation is performing, shows what could be achieved in terms of quality improvements and financial savings and then helps you monitor and sustain the impact of the changes you make.
It’s hard to make changes on your own, with many improvement programmes failing to come close to expected and timely returns. Better use of information and working with experienced partners reduces the risks associated with change and embeds process improvements within your clinical and management processes for measurable and sustainable contribution towards your organisational objectives.
An intelligent approach to process improvement
Dr Foster Intelligence and GE Healthcare Performance Solutions have created a partnership that delivers an innovative approach to performance improvement: intelligent Process Improvement (iPI). An insight-led process improvement approach, iPI tackles the right issues for your organisation to deliver rapid, tangible and sustainable improvements and savings. The iPI programme follows three key stages:
1 Identify
Unlike other approaches to process improvement, which start with several costly weeks of ‘discovery’, the iPI solution is based on up-front identification of where you can make improvements and savings. We do this by benchmarking your performance at the outset, nationally and against selected peers, around four domains of performance: patient experience, workforce, effectiveness and efficiency. We then use this to identify areas of outlying performance.
The identification stage not only shows you how your trust is performing operationally, but also translates this to the savings you could make through iPI.
2 Improve
The most effective way of improving complex health systems and delivering major impact for NHS trusts is the application of GE Healthcare’s focused multi-disciplinary and cross-functional improvement capability. Our approach delivers actual change, not just a plan for change, and the expected benefits, with you. It is based on a collaborative and facilitative approach to working with trust staff, helping them to take ownership of the processes they own and delivering a clear vision and roadmap for the change developed by the process owners themselves.
Our Performance Solutions team are drawn from a variety of backgrounds and includes clinicians, doctors, health managers as well as strategy and change consultants, all steeped in the skills that GE uses to maintain itself as one of the world’s most successful and long-lived organisations. They are passionate about improving the NHS and are experienced in driving change using GE’s proven culture and behavioural change methodology especially relevant to the needs of the NHS today. This team brings expertise in Integrated Health, Clinical Decision Support, Patient Care Capacity Management in addition to highly regarded leadership development capability drawing on GE’s international reputation.1
3 Sustain
On completion of the iPI programme we provide you with the iPI Dashboard, which both enables you to monitor the impact of change on a daily basis and benchmark your performance nationally to help realign your targets, and lock in the outcomes of the work. The iPI Dashboard is designed to track and secure tangible benefits on an ongoing basis. Harnessing both your local data and the national Secondary Uses Service (SUS) dataset, the iPI Dashboard is calibrated to your trust’s specific needs, with daily updates to highlight variance from plan and alerts around any deviations by specialty.
Tangible benefits, measurable change
- Delivering strategy and reform
- Supporting the FT agenda
- Post merger integration, readiness for integrated healthcare
- Operational and organisational performance
- Productivity improvement
- Workforce optimisation
- Enhanced demand/capacity planning
- Financial
- Measurable and sustainable efficiency savings
- Patient-level costing and financial control
- Financial turnaround
- Quality and patient safety
- Benchmarking against national peers and internal targets
- Reduced clinical and medication errors and variance
- Reduced HCAI
- Understanding drivers of mortality ratios
- Patient experience
- Tracking and feedback of patient experience
1 GE ranked by HayGroup as No.1 in ‘Best Companies for Leadership’ study 2010, 2009, 2008
Case Study: Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust achieves £1.8 million savings through insight-driven process improvement
Understanding performance Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust has been using Dr Foster’s quality and efficiency benchmarking solutions since 2007 to monitor performance and identify and prioritise areas for improvement, against both national targets and peer hospitals across England.
Process improvement
GE Healthcare Performance Solutions was commissioned by the trust to carry out two phases of process improvement work between Q4 2009 and Q3 2010. These two phases consisted of four projects, led by the GE improvement team:
- Day of Surgery Admissions Unit pilot for colorectal surgery and urology.
- Outpatients efficiency for oral surgery with subsequent roll-out to ear nose and throat (ENT) and ophthalmology.
- Respiratory care non-elective inpatient stay and referrals management, including Choose and Book.
Measurable and sustainable change
GE Healthcare and Dr Foster worked together to identify, measure and understand the improvements in productivity and quality delivered by the process improvement programme. A comparison and analysis of performance between Q3 2009 and Q3 2010 revealed significant improvements around key indicators of productivity and quality for each specialty, at the same time as releasing £1.8 million savings in the first year.
“The combination of data insight from Dr Foster and GE Healthcare's process improvement expertise has helped us make real and sustainable improvements around quality and effciency. Working in partnership has added value to both patients and the Trust.” - Andrew Reed, Chief Executive, Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust