The problem

In order to approve invoices for enteral feeding the dietetics clinical head of service has to review large volumes of paper-based backing information to identify trends and anomalies. Without this work, the expenditure cannot be validated.

The challenge

How might we reduce the amount of time spent by the dietetics clinical head of service on reviewing and formatting data so that their clinical time can be freed up whilst maintaining governance, enabling the identification of potential savings and improving oversight of the products required by higher risk patients.

The outputs

The innovation has resulted in several outputs, including:

• A single source of year-to-date enteral feed spend presented in a user-friendly format accessible to non-finance colleagues, providing greater depth of understanding of the financial position.
• A significant time saving for the dietetics clinical head of service who no longer needs to manually review paper invoices, allowing them to focus on their clinical duties.
• The flexible format of the dashboard enables easy adaptation to changing needs, ensuring its usefulness to the organisation in the future.
• The innovation has also stimulated further developments by leveraging the PowerBI knowledge gained by the team to improve other tasks.

The outcomes

Our innovation has resulted in several significant outcomes, including:

• A tangible improvement to the morale of the dietetics clinical head of service, who can now easily view information in a user-friendly format and manage the service more effectively.
• The dashboard supports the enteral feeding service in providing the highest standard of patient care, by enabling easy viewing of the products being used while maintaining a close correlation to the financial resources of the organisation.
• The training provided by the business intelligence team, combined with the presentation by Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust, has significantly increased the finance team’s knowledge of PowerBI, with potential for its application in other areas.

Our innovation is aligned with Leeds Community Healthcare’s ‘How We Work’ core values of ‘Adapting to change and delivering improvements’ and ’Finding solutions.’