EFFICIENCY
Trends
“Costs are a big issue. Prices are constantly going up – printers are stuck between a rock and a hard place: prices of consumables constantly rising, while the cli- ent doesn’t want to pay any more. Something has got to give.
“But one area worth mentioning is hybrid mail. At a big NHS trust, lots of different people in differ- ent departments will be sending out external post – writing it out themselves, printing it out local- ly, folding it, putting a stamp on it, and walking down to the post room – all of which is costly.
“But with hybrid mail, everyone at the trust would be given a tem- plate so they could input a letter, and when they are happy it would be sent to print in a central area, or with an outsourced printer, who would then print it out on their let- terhead, or in colour and drop their logo on, folding it, bundling it all, and franking it, and making sure they got the best postal discount. They would collate all of the day’s
mail, and rather than people pay- ing 46p for a stamp, you’d pay only 35p, say. Plus, think of the price of ink cartridges for desktop printers – almost more than gold – it’s also reducing those costs, and crucially, reducing people’s wasted time from walking to the post room.
“Another technique is the use of SMS for appointment alerts to re- mind people. There are stats show- ing that if people are reminded the day before on their mobile, there’s a much lower drop-out rate for ap- pointments.
“There’s also the opportunity, if there’s an internal magazine, for that to be digitised, with links and video streamed into it. That’s a complementary service. For an NHS trust with a duty of care to spread a certain message,
they
can’t be criticised for not trying all channels.”
Andrew Pearce
FOR MORE INFORMATION Visit
www.ipia.org.uk
Kevin Rendell of Beehive Healthcare explains why healthcare managers must make use of the private sector.
In
times of financial austerity, when quite literally every
penny counts, you have to wonder why Trusts are spending money on the provision of a full range of services themselves, when the pri- vate sector could help.
Healthcare managers must see beyond their age-old fears that private companies are inherently bad to realise the positive impact such companies can have on the well-being of patients.
Experience has taught the private sector how to perform without excessive wastage of time or facili- ties, and especially without an ex- cessive wastage of money.
Provision of diagnostic ultrasound is just one example of a range of specialist services that do not nec- essarily need management from within the NHS. Such services can
FOR MORE INFORMATION
T: 0208 550 9108 F: 0208 551 5911 E:
enquiries@beehive-solutions.co.uk
be safely passed on to external providers, whilst NHS clinical and administrative leads can monitor the service to ensure that quality does not suffer.
Across the country, more and more service managers are rec- ognising the advantages of our sourcing ultrasound lists, freeing up equipment and man-power re- sources for other tasks– don’t be left behind.
Ian Kent, of 3M Health Information Systems, explains how smartphones can transform the way doctors access information. F
or 3M Health Information Systems (HIS), the “mobile
cloud” presents an opportunity to improve healthcare informatics, by empowering healthcare profes- sionals to access the information they want, when they want, where they want.
Smartphone ownership is already common among doctors, but use is currently often restricted to ac- cessing clinical content and per- forming simple tasks. However, industry analysts Manhattan Re- search say that within the next two years 81% of US doctors will own a smartphone (up from 64% in 2009), and that about half of this group will use their devices for ad- ministrative functions, learning, and patient care.
In another survey, smartphone usage by UK registered health pro- fessionals was found to be 81%,
38 | national health executive Sep/Oct 11
with 46% accessing information on the intranet/internet.
It concludes: “Mobile phone usage by registered health professionals for work related purposes is signif- icant, despite the potential barri- ers of economics and policy. More
should be done to improve clinical communication using mobile tech- nology in order to improve patient care [and] raise productivity.”
3M HIS intends to be a leader in this technology and will shortly be releasing a mobile version of its market leading clinical encoder, 3M Medicode, initially for the iPhone and iPad, and eventually platform agnostic.
With the first generation of Medi- code mobile, 3M HIS will provide clinical coders in the UK with an electronic repository for clinical coding. This will include all the information within the ICD10 and OPCS 4.6 tabular and index books.
3M HIS mobile solution will en- able healthcare professionals to have immediate access to the in- formation they require without needing access to their ICD10
or OPCS books. This will assist healthcare professionals during meetings and allow clinical coders to work across multiple sites with- out the need for additional copies of their reference material.
3M HIS is a division of the global innovation company 3M, with de- cades of experience and expertise in developing health care tech- nologies.
3M HIS develops software systems to support the health informatics sector; with encoding, quality, an- alytical, document management, imaging and transcription soft- ware, plus a wide range of services including training, consultancy, auditing and coding.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
T: 0800 626578 E:
help.HIS.UK@
3M.com W:
www.3m.com/uk/his
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