The significant impact of improved supplier relationship management resulted in lowering hospital admissions, performance improvements and financial savings within the first 12 months of operation.

Background

Nursing care providers across Lancashire and South Cumbria needed to complete and submit a monthly questionnaire for each clinical commissioning group (CCG) that they worked with. Residential care providers in the region were not asked to do this. This agreement was labour intensive for providers and difficult for the CCGs to manage, whilst creating an inconsistency in how they managed local care operators.​

The integrated care system, Healthier Lancashire and South Cumbria, wanted to improve the process. ​

Action

NHS Midlands and Lancashire, with technology partner, adam, implemented a supplier relationship management module for the group. This highly secure, cloud-based and fully mobile-compatible application incorporates a range of features including:​

• automated collation of data from providers​
• systemised data analysis and interpretation (including scoring and RAG statuses)​
• easy-to-use interactive charts and dashboards​
• communication tools to engage and share information back and forth with providers. ​

Impact

Implementation of the supplier relationship management module resulted in:​

• significant time savings for customers in collecting data from local providers around the quality of care​
• improved insight over quality of care to inform provider management activities and policy setting​
• configuration of communication tools to improve information sharing with providers​
• improved quality of care across the region as staff can spend less time gathering information, and more time focusing on areas of under performance.​
  ​

Just looking at hospital admissions alone, the supplier relationship management tool has helped one CCG save 17 unscheduled hospital admissions per month, which equates to a financial saving of at least £13,000 per month (assuming a minimum 2-day stay per visit).​

One CCG has reported the following performance improvements over the first 12 months:​

• reduction in average number of falls monthly from 238 to 93​
• reduction in providers rated Red or Amber under their quality monitoring guidelines from 12 to one​
• urinary tract infections down from 54 to 16 a month​
• unscheduled hospital admissions down from 49 per month to 32.​

Further information

For more information please contact mlcsu.personalisedhealthcare@nhs.net