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NHSBSA Harnessing technology to better patient care
NHSBSA Harnessing the power of technology to better patient care
Behind the development of new digital tools, the NHSBSA continues to support the healthcare of patients in England and Wales, transforming its services to guarantee the delivery of industry-leading services
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stablished in 2006, the National Health Service Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) has centralised a multitude of services under one core umbrella. This includes Citizen Services, (Help with Health Costs and Student Services), Primary Care Services (Prescription Services and Dental Services) and NHS Workforce Services (NHS Pensions and HR Shared Services). The organisation strives to support patients in the daily management of their healthcare needs, embracing new digital tools in order to provide a service that is resilient, seamless and caters for all ages amidst growing consumer demands. “In terms of a transformation, it’s not just around technology. Over the last two years, we recognised that we needed to transform our
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services to be able to cope with the demand and pressures being placed upon them,” explains NHSBSA’s Chief Digital Officer Darren Curry. “To increase demand for our services and make them more efficient, not just from a cost perspective but through ease of use, access and speed, my role has been to take the organisation on that journey, developing digital services for our users, customers and other NHS organisations.” Seamless services The NHSBSA’s journey has seen its services move towards an increasingly customer-centric model, which has seen it not only transform end to end user experiences, but also the culture of how the organisation views and delivers its services.
Darren Curry Chief Digital Officer
Darren is an experienced transformation leader with 17 years’ experience in the NHS both patient facing and non-patient facing. With a varied breadth of experience and a background including Digital Transformation, Portfolio, Programme and Project Management and Primary Care managing a GP Practice
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NHS BSA RADICALLY TRANSFORMS CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY Digital technologies are changing the way in which clinicians, citizens and patients manage and make use of the UK health system. As a result, this is enabling health enterprises to improve labour productivity, human experiences and allowing clinicians and service workers to broadly apply their knowledge. It is no longer about what technology can do for people but what people can do with technology.
Accenture to bring the full scale of Accenture’s skills and approach. The Digital Factory balances the certainty of a supply of skilled resources, provided in a managed service structure against the need to adapt to changes in demand that come when undertaking ambitious and innovative programmes. Resources and teams are scaled up and down depending on the total number of projects as well as the demands of the project.
The NHS Business Service Authority (NHS BSA) is working closely with Accenture to change the way it interacts with its customers and sharpen its focus on high-quality and high-value interactions across customers and the services it provides. Digitisation is at the core of this ambitious initiative, enabling fundamental changes to how services are currently delivered.
This collaboration is enabling the NHS BSA to continue its digital transformation journey, working alongside Accenture to adapt and scale to meet demand fluctuations over time. Accenture understands the need to evolve with its customers by providing consistent high-quality delivery and harnessing Accenture’s broad range of innovations in supporting its client’s vision. When digital technologies adapt to the people that use it in healthcare—health insurers, providers and consumers—people have the power to define the future of healthcare.
Accenture is currently working with NHS BSA in a flexible model called the Digital Factory. The Digital Factory acts as an entry point into
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‘The Authority will roll out Artificial Intelligence in all of its contact centres to cater to increased patient demand’
“We’ve altered our delivery model to become increasingly agile, where we are looking at our services from a user need perspective and reacting to those changing needs. We have therefore built a strong emphasis upon user research and creative roles in the organisation in order to build services which meet the needs of those users,” Curry says. Adopting a cloud-first hosting model has been instrumental to the growth and improvement of NHSBSA’s services and enabled it to cater towards growing populations and increased demands on its traditional service model. “Our cloud services were developed in partnership with Arcus and Amazon Web Services (AWS),” adds Curry. “This has enabled us to increase flexibility while reducing deployment times so that we’re now deploying multiple releases per month. It’s still less than where we ultimately want to be, but it’s a lot quicker than where we were.” New, digital ways of working have also removed any potential difficulties within traditional, paper led processes and applications, where new digital applications have saved not only time for end users
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and clinicians while driving down costs for the Authority. Additionally, embracing technology has led to an increased public awareness regarding the types of services and support that the Authority can offer. However, testing new services and garnering feedback through consumer engagement has been essential. The implementation of cross-functional teams, where midwives, pharmacists, hospital
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staff and GP’s have been included in the development of the services provided, has only seen services improve and receive positive feedback across the board. “Developers, project managers, researchers and designers all take these products out and show them to users in real world scenarios in order to improve the access of these services and make them as easy to use as possible,� adds Curry.
When we spoke to users, we were able to redesign certain features, and have seen an increase of approximately 70% in cases where people now complete their journeys online – Darren Curry, Chief Digital Officer
Patient support One such area of extensive positive feedback is how digital tools have raised awareness of the NHSBSA’s Help with Health Costs services. “From user research, we identified a need for users to obtain better visibility of the help with health costs they were entitled to,” notes Curry. “This has traditionally been a paper process, with multiple pages and a lot of understanding needed,
making it quite difficult for some people to access. Through the work that we’re doing, we have made it possible for a user to identify what help with health costs they could get in less than five minutes online. “Some people we spoke with weren’t getting essential treatment because they couldn’t afford it or were not aware that a service existed. We are therefore making our services as accessible as possible,
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in order to make a direct impact.” Working alongside Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) has also seen the NHSBSA develop services which provide analytics to prescribers through its ePACT2 product, a Business Intelligence (BI) tool where data surrounding dispensing trends can help identify emerging trends, but also mitigate particular risks. One area that this has been used is in Polypharmacy, where a patient may be prescribed 10 or more medicines
Some people we spoke with weren’t getting essential treatment because they couldn’t afford it or were not aware that this service existed. We are making our services as accessible as possible – Darren Curry, Chief Digital Officer
at the same time. Indicators can be has been completed, where similar used to identify particular patient technologies seen in Amazon Alexa groups that maybe at more risk and have also been embedded within the enable informed insight to prescribers. Authority’s contact centre operations. “The system allows a CCG to “It’s providing a number of benefits identify trends. It’s predicting these to users. We implemented this in four things and utilising historical data. weeks and went live with an initial You know patients prescribed A and service. However, we also made sure B, but therefore they that patients had the now have an increased opportunity to drop NHSBSA was risk of developing out and speak to an established in X. It has been well operator at any point received,” says Curry. in the process, as we don’t want to force Partner power people to use it,” With growing observes Curry. populations and a “Through this shrinking healthcare budget, patient process, we had a success rate services continue to remain under of over 40% of all customers that strain, leading the healthcare industry called in, where their queries could to continue to look at providing be resolved with the AI which had digital solutions to its customers. been put in place. Whilst users Utilising artificial intelligence (AI), can talk to an operator between the NHSBSA’s contact centre has 7am and 5pm, we’ve got AI on the piloted supporting users in some phone 24 hours, seven days a week. of the most routine questions, This is now set to be rolled out. leading to a drop in wait times and “I’m looking to explore where we an increase in operator availability. can apply that technology further,” Working with Arcus and Amazon, continues Curry. “This will enable our the NHSBSA’s initial proof of concept contact centre operators to speak with
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users who need more support and have complex queries giving people an increased quality of service. “However, whilst we’ve made incremental improvements, it’s difficult to be constantly ahead of new technology and new approaches to delivery, which is one of the key drivers of doing the transformation.” Service improvements Monitoring all user feedback via data analytics, the NHSBSA continues to listen to its customers
in order to develop, enhance and improve its products and services. For example, its prescription prepayment service, where patients with multiple prescriptions are able to obtain a pre-payment service where for a set fee, a patient may get as many prescriptions as they need, which Curry describes as “kind of
NHSBSA has
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a season ticket for prescriptions. “People were originally a bit reticent due to the look and feel of the service and the payment screen associated with it,” observes Curry. “We identified through Google Analytics that people were therefore dropping out at specific points. When we spoke to users, we were able to redesign these features, and have seen an increase of approximately 70% in cases where people now complete their journey online.” Working to build capability Aligned with UK Government ITC strategy to drive innovation and increase efficiencies, NHSBSA is collaborating with established, innovative companies and SME suppliers. Through this, the organisation is increasing selfsufficiency and building capability. One such example is through its partnership with Valtech in the transformation of pension services, supporting the development of the NHSBSA team’s knowledge and skills. Valtech have been supporting NHSBSA since mid-2016, and has
established blended, co-located teams on NHSBSA sites in Fleetwood, Newcastle, and in their own offices in central Manchester. In partnership with Valtech, NHSBSA is delivering a range of new, innovative services within the Digitisation of Pensions, enabling members to manage their pensions more efficiently. From day
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When we spoke to users, we were able to redesign certain features, and have seen an increase of approximately 70% in cases where people now complete their journeys online – Darren Curry, Chief Digital Officer
one, a key goal of the engagement has been to establish and grow in-house capability, reducing longterm reliance on suppliers. Working with enablement and delivery experts such as Valtech, NHSBSA is employing the collaborative delivery of business-critical services as a catalyst for digital transformation. “We’re making sure that within these partnerships there is an arrangement to increase knowledge in there,” adds Curry. “It’s as much about leaving a self-sustainable capability and not creating a reliance or dependency as it is about the service. Working with partners such as Valtech on collaborative delivery supports this.” Future improvements With Curry describing the healthcare industry as “a hotbed of innovation,”
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the emergence of health wearables and products to support patients in the daily management of their healthcare needs will continue to inspire the NHSBSA to develop and deliver exceptional user-focused solutions. “In the future, we’ll get a lot more analytics predicting health issues. People will then address them in advance of them occurring,” concludes Curry. “I think there is a huge opportunity in the joining of social care in the UK. Through the use of technology, we can put the onus of enablement upon the patient or the user to take their health into their own hands. “We are very much on an ongoing road map for all of our services, delivering the transformation and continuing to carry out user research to the benefit of our patients.”
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