Over the past two posts we have welcomed the expected (modest) capital investment that is heading the NHS’s way, and shown how incremental investments can build a virtuous cycle of productivity if the journey is coherently planned.

In this final post of the series, we will outline what makes this possible at affordable cost and on familiar technology. Don’t worry if you aren’t technically-minded or into things digital, because we all use enough technology in our daily lives to understand this quite easily.

Clinicians and managers spend extraordinary amounts of time looking for information and making sense of it, usually on paper or in spreadsheets. This is caused by data being scattered across a variety of different computer systems, with each system organising its data differently.

To some extent this variety is inevitable. Healthcare is complex and specialised, so it is not surprising that complex and specialised computer systems have been created to optimise record-keeping and management for each clinical task.

However it is not inevitable that all this data should only exist in its original forms. The usual solution is to take a copy of the source data, transform it once or twice to impose a degree of standardisation on it, and put it all in one place – this is often called a data warehouse or business intelligence system.

Note: a degree of standardisation, not full standardisation. Perhaps you want a pathway management system, or a performance dashboard, or to report data to the government? You need to build it as best you can, given the uniqueness and variety of the data even after it reaches the data warehouse. And if any of the source computer systems are replaced, then all the other tools that relied on it will need to be rebuilt, based on how data is stored in the new one.

At this point you are probably wondering why the data is not fully standardised, to solve all those problems once and for all? We wondered that too. And we found out why, when we achieved it: it’s really hard. It typically takes about two dozen meticulous transformations, with localisations and other business rules injected along the way, to standardise for any system in the hospital, any sector of the NHS, and even for industries outside healthcare.

But we did achieve it, and it’s called the Unified Data Layer (UDL) from Insource. This is the backbone for connecting patient comms, pathway management systems, and everything else you need to manage an efficient, modern hospital. The data is all in familiar Microsoft databases, so you aren’t stuck with exotic underlying technologies, and you retain the freedom to choose and swap your suppliers for the systems that sit on top.

That is how we make it affordable within modest investment. That is how we join up your processes, and free up staff to solve capacity problems and improve patient pathways. And that is how we turn this virtuous cycle of improvement into a journey that you can take at your own pace, with every incremental improvement building on the last.

Now, let’s talk about how it would specifically work where you are. Drop us a line and we can start the discussion now. So when the capital investment starts to flow, you’ll be ready to make a successful bid and start the journey, knowing already where you want it to take you.