providing information required
Apart from showing how well NHS Bury meets its present payment targets, Monarch can predict accurately
the extra liquidity required if the Trust were to move from its present payment terms towards a ten-day figure.
The Strategic Health Authority appears to have been impressed with the quality of information available.
A primary destination for the applica- ploying Monarch. Once the development The additional cost per desk - £460
tions at NHS Bury, however, is Microsoft team has set up the routines which ex- rather than £380 – was justified by the
Access databases. “This is another ex- tract data from the component systems’ increased performance, as McMahon
port mode for Monarch reporting: there reports, it requires no additional pro- explained. “To download the ledger as a
is a seamless transition from the report gramming skills to maintain the tool’s text file and bring it into Monarch would
mining and modelling stages, and the performance. have taken nearer 12 hours, compared
one-click process can be automated so with the 10 minutes needed to extract
that data is fed into Access without any from the PDF.”
additional coding.
More time for decision-making
“That is consistent the Audit Commis- Rather than seeing this as a progressive
sion’s view that the public sector should de-skilling of the tasks, it means that the
Convinced of benefits
try to source information once, but ap- staff responsible for applying the infor- The financial accounting team at NHS
ply it numerous times.” mation generated can spend more of Bury is clearly convinced of the benefits
The saving of time in preparing reports their time in decision-making rather attributed to Monarch. When a user gains
is perhaps not the only benefit in em- than computation. considerable working knowledge of a
The early days of computing were be- product, however, a handful of minor
“With its ability to drill down into
set with problems caused by a lack of problems might emerge.
foresight on the part of developers: Listening to the commentary at Bury,
multiple data sources and its
wholly erroneous or misleading results it appears that there was a minor irritant
modelling facility which
were generated because quite basic rather than a major problem. It is that if
checks and balances had not been built the report mining tool could be linked
extrapolates that data to provide
into systems. directly into the ESR database rather
Monarch, it appears, has gone the extra than to the reports it generates (so that
previously unavailable
mile in handling logical discontinuities Monarch was viewing payroll data in
information, Monarch has proved
in the data being reported. Lee McMahon real time), there would be a saving of
cited the example of the staff numbers about 10 minutes on each run.
to be a major contributor to
field exported in reports from the ESR As the task is repeated two or three
Human Resources system. times every day, there could be addi-
that decision-making process.”
“If raw data from ESR were to be ex- tional savings of around 2.5 hours per
ported into a database, and the field was week. In the total picture of the Trust’s
showing zero staff, a null entry would be financial management, that would be a
made instead of a zero. Any attempts to very small benefit, and certainly not one
aggregate those staff totals would yield whose omission would take anything
an incorrect result. “Monarch scores away from the case for Monarch.
heavily by recognising that a zero is im-
plied and makes an intelligent conversion of
data rather than simply re-formatting it.”
Providing succinct information
Lee McMahon would be the first to set that
Opting for Monarch Pro version
‘defect’ in context. “Financial efficiency
in a PCT is about managing data to pro-
When NHS Bury considered purchasing vide succinct information – reports – on
the desktop version of Monarch, it had which effective decisions can be made.
two choices – the standard and profes- “With its ability to drill down into multi-
sional versions of the tool. The Trust ple data sources and its modelling facil-
opted for Monarch Pro, which supports ity which extrapolates that data to provide
the extraction and importing of data from previously unavailable information, Mon-
reports in PDF format rather than just arch has proved to be a major contributor
columnar file format. to that decision-making process.” §
The Informed Executive
57
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98