Some easy ways to cut NHS back-end administration costs

The Welsh Audit Office recently said that the NHS in Wales will not be able to break even on their current budgets and could even be £70m in the red at the end of the financial year. It’s a legal requirement for NHS Organisations to break even, so for those already struggling to reduce costs, this is not good news.

Reducing NHS back-end administration costs will help

ProcessFlows uses technology to upgrade existing IT systems and processes, to provide a more efficient, cost effective and compliant alternative to manual ways of doing things – which don’t easily adapt to reduced resource and growing demand.

Front line improvements

Slicker appointment processes
Using text to remind patients about their appointment can dramatically reduce thousands of missed appointments every year and their associated wasted cost. The Department of Health said that 1 in 10 hospital appointments in England were missed last year … and then there are the missed GP appointments.

ProcessFlows text solutions for appointment reminders are bespoke. We can integrate with any electronic patient appointment system and customise how it works to accommodate incumbent processes and structures. Appointment ProcessFlows can be totally automatic and it’s bi-directional, so patients can reply to a reminder, cancel or request an alternative appointment.

Unified messaging for enhanced patient and staff communications
Our messaging solutions deal with all inbound calls, coping with any peaks seamlessly. Callers are automatically routed to the most appropriate person or department. If our ‘call attendant’ can’t get the caller through to a specified person, callers have the choice to be re-routed to another contact or leave a message on that person’s dedicated voicemail; which can be accessed by them from any location.

Being able to get through to the correct person or clinic in a single call, immediately improves the contact experience for patients and increases staff efficiency.

‘Good Housekeeping’ technology which makes the back office more efficient

Easy access to patient, staff and estate information
NHS staff can spend a lot of their time locating patient information. Document management solutions integrate with existing line of business systems to provide a digital filing cabinet and archive for all records.

They make it easy for staff in every department to access patient information. Clinical staff can easily find a test result or letter from their familiar desktop interface and those responsible for maintaining the building and those in Occupational Health can also benefit from click-of-a-button access to all records.

Whatever department – finding further storage space for newly archived records is no longer a problem. If the existing archive is scanned into electronic format and stored within the Document Management filing system, offices and basements occupied by ancient dusty files can be reclaimed and put to better use.

Electronic fax for quick and secure document delivery
Fax is still the most reliable way of communicating confidential information. If you can swap multiple numbers of stand–alone fax machines for an electronic, desktop fax alternative, you will immediately reduce costs – line rental, paper, toner etc – tighten up security and improve efficiency. Staff will no longer have to leave their desk to fax a document and then worry that it may be sat on the fax machine the other end for anyone to see.

Electronic fax systems normally pay for themselves within 6 months.

Print Management
Print management technology works quietly behind the scenes – automatically routing print to the most efficient output device on the network for the job and constantly monitoring device throughput. It will re-educate staff on the best-practices for printing, put a stop to wasteful printing habits and tighten up print security/confidentiality throughout the entire organisation.

Or ask us to do it

If you have a particular project or ‘non-core’ activity that can’t be done in-house because of budget restrictions, ProcessFlows can help.
We provide remote, pay-as-you-go outsourcing for financial and administration processing, HR, data cleansing, data entry, marketing and customer services.

Our differentiator is our staff – they are dedicated to each outsourcing client for the duration of any contract and if you want to, you can retain total management of your virtual team on a day-to-day basis. The result is an informed member of staff who is able to interact with your organisation knowledgeably … and if this is a customer services role, this is much more professional than any script.

We can also help you source sensible prices on software, saving those in procurement a lot of time. So, if you need to start shopping around for new software applications, give our Software Sourcing team a call.

More information

If you would like more information on anything mentioned above, you can call us on +44 (0) 1962 835053, or email enquiries@processflows.co.uk.