The Treasury minister responsible for expenditure, Darren Jones, has kicked off a spending review that looks for technology to reduce day-to-day expenditure, Civil Service World reports. NHS waiting lists are lined up for priority funding as one of the new government’s “first steps”.

Waiting lists are an excellent place to go looking for tech-fuelled productivity gains.

Hospitals tackle long waits by laying on ‘waiting list initiatives’. These are typically extra sessions in the evenings or at weekends, paying staff higher rates for the extra hours. But if the NHS had better planning systems (which require better data), they could shift much of this unavoidable work into the main working week when costs are lower.

Patients typically start their elective care with an appointment at the acute hospital. But if the hospital had better data about the patient when they were referred, they could stream many of them to lower-complexity settings such as virtual appointments, non-consultant or non-medical clinicians, and smaller facilities elsewhere. Those settings tend to be lower-cost and underutilised, so making better use of them would save money and expand the NHS’s capacity.

Those two examples are only the beginning, and there are dozens of ways that better data can bring down waiting times and reduce costs. We should know, because this is our focus.

Insource bring data together from disparate NHS IT systems into an quality-controlled and standardised Unified Data Layer, and then sit advanced analytics on top. So hospitals get a much more reliable view of the data for accurate management and effective patient tracking.

If your part of the NHS is looking for better productivity, and shorter elective waits, and a solid bid for this priority funding, then why not drop us a line? We can help you succeed on all three.