The PLICS Opportunity Scoper
Patient Level Costing has played an evolving role in improving services at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. However, with an increasing focus on identifying and eliminating waste and inefficiency, the Costing team believed they were not harnessing the full potential of what could be achieved from the various information streams they have access to, as well as other external sources of benchmarking information.
The team wanted to create something that identified areas of opportunity for their users without them having to wade through masses of data or visiting different portals to find these. They also wanted to present these in ways designed to help evidence and inform conversations to tackle unwarranted variations in clinical practice and allow for more time to make use of the information rather than analysing it.
At the VMAC 2018, Vinod Bassi, Assistant Director of Finance and Tom Mitchell, Student Finance Officer, hosted a market stall to showcase their solution to these problems – the PLICS Opportunity Scoper. The session aimed to show how powerful data can be when it’s transformed into meaningful information, and to share how this was achieved to inspire others in doing something similar. They talked through the journey of creating the tool and highlighted the benefits of including clinical information (such as operating times or test requested), alongside the financials to really help engage clinical colleagues by showing how much of an impact their day-to-day decisions have. They provided real examples of its use in Leeds, and ultimately, the impact that an idea of ‘what if we could…’ that originated from a small team has had in such a large organisation to support the delivery of improved patient services.