Data analytics to streamline healthcare costs

The STFC Hartree Centre helped Albatross Financial Solutions optimise the patient cost benchmarking service it provides to NHS Trusts, helping them to validate and predict costs more accurately and establish best practices.

Challenge

Most of us will contract an illness, disease or injury at some point in our lives and require a medical procedure to resolve it. Diagnosis, consultancy, treatment, aftercare – all of these activities have an associated cost. For most patients, the National Health Service (NHS) Trust foots the bill, but how do they standardise and predict costs in order to allocate their resources efficiently and accurately?

Albatross Financial Solutions has 15 years of experience working with over 80 NHS Trusts across England & Wales. Albatross provides a Patient Cost Benchmarking (PCB) service that compares and validates detailed cost and activity information from different organisations. This enables NHS Trusts to identify areas for improvement and adjust processes to maximise on resources. Albatross wanted to develop the service further to provide more advanced insights, which meant finding the means to undertake a more detailed analysis, exploration and interpretation of vast quantities of data.

Approach

In order to build a model that would explore the relationship between the different costing techniques, Albatross approached the Hartree Centre, a leading provider of intense computing and data analytics services. Combining the ability to process and analyse large quantities of complex healthcare data with the visualisation facilities required for detailed exploration and interpretation, the Hartree Centre was the perfect partner to help Albatross develop its new benchmarking data analytics platform.

Benefits

The new data analytics model will provide advanced exploration and discovery capabilities on a consolidated platform, enabling NHS Trusts to benchmark costing criteria more accurately. Short term, this service should help to identify areas where healthcare organisations could make cost savings. Long term, the solution should provide a capability that enhances decision-making and provides insight to streamline healthcare processes, saving time and money. The results of this project have been well received by the PCB group, which suggests that Albatross will also benefit from an augmented product that is set to be a significant commercial success.

“Whilst Albatross can deliver detailed individual analysis for our customers, analysing the entire national dataset is far more complex and time-consuming. We gave the Hartree Centre two clear objectives during the project’s proof of concept phase and I am pleased to say that they delivered detailed insights in the entire dataset quickly and effectively. We’ve no doubt that our results will go on to benefit the NHS in future.”

Michael Hamilton, Albatross Financial Solutions