monarch application
Putting in place the tools to
improve efficiency at the NHS grass roots
Has an NHS Shared Service found a vehicle able to integrate data
arriving from four clients and an array of information systems?
to extract that information and merge it “Some of these ‘audiences’ overlap, in- practice, this is not the case, and con-
with other streams of information to pro- cluding the Estates function, which has siderable work would be involved in
duce meaningful management reports.” its own application package that is used achieving it. Though one of the reasons
to manage works and maintenance jobs. for setting up a shared service was to
Integrating diverse systems
Cost information from Estates has to be streamline business processes, we found
converted each month into financial ourselves with something close to a
The Integra general ledger system is one data compatible with our financial sys- Tower of Babel.”
of two core systems in use at North tems. It was taking up to a week every
Staffs: the other is the ESR (Electronic month to make the journal entries, most
Staff Records) payroll system that has of which were for small amounts.”
Datawatch Monarch selected
been implemented across the NHS. That process was improved when the The fact that North Staffs Finance and
(NHS Foundation Trusts have the option Systems team requested the data from Registration Shared Service continues
to take up the same application but are Estates in an email, which made it easier to improve would suggest that a solution
not required to do so.) to extract. “We wrote a macro in Micro- had been found for handling the data reach-
Given that the financial data gener- soft Excel so that the file could be fed ing the organisation from its four clients and
ated by the ESR system is an essential into a ledger. But if the report changed an array of information systems.
component of the reports which Neil in any way, the macro had to be adjusted What Neil Davies and his colleagues
Davies and his colleagues produce, there to handle the new data format, and that did was to install a tool at the centre of
had to be a method of generating that was skills intensive.” the ‘nervous system’ to buffer the incom-
data in a compatible format. A brief assessment of the systems in- ing data streams, convert that material
But the requirement for integration volved reveals that all can now output into a consistent Excel format, and use
does not end there. There are other sys- reports in Adobe PDF format, surely a lin- it to produce the reports.
tems whose output data also has to be gua franca that should simplify the process The tool selected was Monarch, from
accessed, and collated to provide ac- of data aggregation? Datawatch, a system that has consist-
counting reports for its different clients. Mr Davies recognised the potential ently differentiated itself in the informa-
In the NHS Combined Health Care Trust, that PDF offers, but highlighted a major tion extraction arena by manipulating the
for example, there are departments flaw in that business case. “It is widely reports produced by business applications
which provide shared services to their assumed that every ‘PDF’ generates out- rather than the raw data itself. It is de-
own clients. put to the same common standard. In scribed as a report mining tool.
Sharing essential back-office services such as payroll and purchasing between NHS organisations in
the same part of the country increases operational efficiencies and helps reduce overhead costs.
The Informed Executive
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