NHS Manchester buys BI from Ardentia

NHS Manchester has deployed Ardentia’s data warehouse and patient level costing modules to replace in house legacy systems and support commissioning and provisioning.

The data warehouse will collect information from the Secondary Uses Service, GP practices and the primary care trust’s provider arm, Manchester Community Health. Relevant staff will be given access to the data via a secure central website.

The Business Intelligence tools have been deployed across the PCT’s commissioning and provisioning functions, to support long-term planning and securing best value.

NHS Manchester spends £15m a year on information services. The new system should allow the organisation to control costs, while at the same time minimising data losses, reducing inconsistencies between different data sources and improving processing times.

Paul McQuaid, project manager at NHS Manchester, said: “These solutions will be crucial to the development of the organisation. They will allow our staff to drill down to obtain valuable patient data, rather than spending time processing documents.

“With a population of 500,000 and approximately 1,000 GP referrals each week, we need the right tools to help deal effectively with business issues and meet our goals.”

A further benefit of the Ardentia system is that it automatically handles changes in data sets and Healthcare Resource Group codes – which were previously time consuming to process manually.

NHS Manchester is also looking to deploy Ardentia’s Pathway Manager, which assists with the 18 week target, and systems that would help it to manage conditions such as childhood obesity and diabetes.