NHS commissioners spend on private healthcare rose by 27% in 2020-21 to more than £18bn. With the establishment of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) on 1 July this year there will be a greater scrutiny of this spend and its effectiveness. 

Thousands of independent sector providers (ISPs) are already helping the NHS tackle the care backlog.  And since the end of the pandemic, the overall share of care delivered by ISPs has grown from 12% to 16% of all NHS-funded planned treatments.

But, with the recent Data Saves Lives strategy, the push is to ensure data can be shared throughout the wider healthcare ecosystem.  Reducing the backlogs and treating patients speedily in the best location is paramount, be that in acute trusts or independent hospitals, specialist GP groups, or community centres.  

Increased demand means increased reporting. And, if private providers are to continue to service NHS contracts, they must comply with pressing demands for data sharing and detailed NHS reporting.

ICSs will request full CDS reporting  

With the establishment of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) independent hospitals are already being asked to provide complex Commissioning Data Set (CDS) reporting – over and above any PHIN (Private Healthcare Information Network) submissions.

At Insource, our data management platform automates all CDS submissions and provides the operational data management and reporting expertise of larger organisations as a managed service. So medium or smaller organisations can deliver the same level of proficiency without the investment in technology or skilled manpower.

We take data from disparate source systems and the PAS/EPRs and combine it into a single, validated source of the truth. We then formulate this unified data into complex CDS data requirements, or any other reporting needs, and automate submissions. For those providers who are also delivering urgent care, our solution also extends to automating ECDS returns.

Consolidated data for performance management

This consolidated data isn’t limited to just CDS information; any activity data and other information can be consolidated and available to the provider for internal performance, clinical and business management. Activity can be tracked in near real-time and Board or BI reports can be extracted against need – hourly, daily, weekly… without huge manpower demands on internal BI or performance teams. And waiting list management, with its single patient tracking list (PTL), can now be implemented to show patients needing urgent care or those with the longest waits.

Community services waiting lists growing exponentially

Whilst independent acute hospitals are about to feel this pressure as ICSs get underway, the community sector is not exempt. A recently leaked document showed that more than one million people are on an unpublished national waiting list for community services – this includes hundreds of thousands of children. And the overall list has increased by 35% in the last year.  

With 1,500 independent providers of community services registered with NHS England and the enormous pressure to release capacity in acute to bring down the backlogs, the spotlight has well and truly shifted to community.

Community providers to formally submit CSDS returns

ICSs have been created to enable collaboration across previously siloed organisations, funding flows and services.  Large tranches of funding have historically gone into acute and in terms of activity reporting they are well served.  But now the focus is on community.  And if we are to really start looking at population health and preventative care, collecting community data is key.

As a result, NHS England has formally requested that all larger community providers do Community Services Data Sets (CSDS) submissions to show detailed activity. Also, a current NHSE urgent care project, which Insource is supporting, is enabling those community providers involved, to get this urgent care data to the centre quickly to enable NHSE to analyse health population dynamics.

Historically CCGs have helped private providers do their CSDS submissions, but the recent mandate from NHS England has insisted that all community providers complete the CSDS submissions themselves.  And for those using the EMIS community system, it has meant spending inordinate amounts of time doing searches on EMIS on KPI activity and downloading CSV files and formulating it into the CSDS format to do the monthly reports.

Insource automates KPI reports and full CSDS submissions

Insource gathers all patient-level activity data from multiple source systems across an independent GP Group or Community organisations and provides fully validated, automated KPI activity reports for submission to NHS Commissioners.  Apart from these monthly reports, which track activity against contracted Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Insource also do national Referral-to-Treatment (RTT) waiting list dataset (CSDS) reporting to the required national data quality standards.

Managed services for optimum use of staff

As data management experts to the NHS, Insource provide a range of managed services for private healthcare groups.  These take the strain out of NHS reporting while providing a powerful data management platform for all organisational performance and business management. With the increased demand for NHS reporting, independent organisations need to decide whether to maintain in-house data skills. Increasingly, they are choosing to leave the data management to the experts and get on with their core business of clinical care – by engaging Insource as a trusted data partner.

With Insource you get access to – industry knowledge, solutions specialists, transformation specialists, information and performance experts, technical and data professionals – across the full life cycle of any project.

Full range of managed services

Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) – gives organisations clean, unified data that is standardised against NHS data dictionary formats and against local and national rules.  This provides a single source of truth for all operational management, business decision making and local and national reporting. Data feeds can be provided for an organisation’s own reporting, AI, BI and management applications.

Reporting-as-a-Service (RaaS) – With a broad catalogue of automated national returns, from extensive CDS (Commissioning Data Sets), ECDS, CSDS, and MHDS… to accurate RTT and non RTT waiting list reporting, we offer providers a fully managed reporting service that ensures data accuracy, timeliness and saves vast amounts of time for in-house staff. 

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Cloud Hosting – To support cloud deployments, we offer an Infrastructure Management Service which gives with complete confidence that all the needs of managing the cloud environment are taken care of. When coupled with our Data-as-a-Service, the combination of cloud deployment and infrastructure management saves time, reduces infrastructure and training costs, releases manpower, avoids system downtime and gives you guaranteed data accessibility throughout the organisation and builds data confidence especially at Board level.  

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Download our Managed Services data sheet here