Labour’s top health adviser – formerly in Tony Blair’s government – had some crunchy things to say about NHS reform, according to the Independent. There is a “different fiscal climate” now compared to when he was health secretary, he said, adding: “If you’ve broadly got less resourcing than then, you’ve got to do more reforming than then.”

It’s the big changes that tend to catch the news: new clinics, new pots of money, and changes in the power structure. But some of the biggest reforms are going to be invisible. They won’t build anything new, or involve a politician cutting a ribbon. Instead they will transform activities that the NHS already does, so that they work a lot better.

Let’s take a simple example: sending text messages to patients to check they’re correctly recorded on a waiting list. In many hospitals this is a semi manual process that might involve: downloading a list of waiting list patients; linking it to their mobile phone numbers; cross-checking against a central database of the deceased; splitting it into separate lists for each specialty; uploading them all to the patient comms portal; sending the specialty-specific text messages; and then taking action on each patient who reports that their details are not correct.

You may already have spotted that doing this manually is laborious and error prone; all that data extraction, linking, checking and uploading is ripe for reliable automation. What is less obvious is that all this activity is isolated; the patients’ responses are left sitting on the patient comms portal, so any information that would be useful later (say, at an outpatient appointment) cannot be seen by staff there.

How much does this matter? By itself, improving this process would make a modest difference. But this is one example out of many. Add them up, and they make a big difference. Not just because of all the time saved by staff, and by reducing errors that need to be sorted out later, but because of the multiplier effect when information from every action is available to benefit every subsequent action.

Best of all, this doesn’t require any costly upheaval of IT, because this is data integration not systems integration. It can all be done incrementally, so that every step brings its own benefits, with a clear roadmap of improvement, and the improvements multiply as more data is unified.

If this sounds like your kind of quality and performance improvement, then get in touch. We have the data management technology and integration capability all ready to go, so let’s discuss how to get the biggest ‘bang’ from your share of the coming capital budgets.