Customer stories
NHS Kent and Medway save the equivalent of over 2,000 days a year across 185 practices
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After successfully using Apex for analytics-driven capacity and demand planning, NHS Kent and Medway ICB's Primary Care team rolled out Apex Contract Manager in July 2022. Since then, they've saved up to 2,220 days per year across 185 practices-valuable time that can be reinvested in caring for patients.
Freeing up time for patient care
Contract Manager allows practices to generate claims and invoice for locally commissioned services in a matter of minutes, rather than producing onerous manual reports to support claims. It gathers monitoring, management, claim validation, and invoicing, for existing and future services into one single mechanism by automatically capturing data from the clinical system on a nightly basis.
Natalie Rennie, Senior Programme Manager in the Primary Care Transformation Team at NHS Kent and Medway, said: “2,220 days already sounds impressive, but in reality, there is an even greater efficiency across the entirety of the care system if time savings from fewer payment queries, audit requests and processing manual claims are included."
Back-office administration can be burdensome for GP practices. The purpose of introducing Contract Manager was to help release time for practices in Kent and Medway to focus on patient care. It’s done that, and more.”
Ben Hampshire, Regional Director at Optum (formerly EMIS), said: “Kent and Medway’s timesaving of around 12 days per practice across the ICB of 185 practices by using Contract Manager really is a phenomenal figure. Especially when you consider those practices are now more financially resilient and the extra time saved can be re-focused onto patient facing activities.
Contract Manager removes the need for time-consuming clinical system searches, exports, and spreadsheet reconciliation. It’s a one-stop digital solution enabling practice teams to review, enhance, and submit claims in the click of a few buttons. And in one format.”
The burden of reconciliation
Prior to Contract Manager, the admin, reconciliation of payments, and invoicing across the ICB was a manual process. The teams raised a search themselves, exported the data to Excel, and created a PDF for the ICB to approve. This process made missed payments more likely, meaning the practices didn’t claim for some services, and they lost out on funds they were owed. In addition, there was no data intelligence, and there was a gap in key performance indicators (KPIs) across practices. This absence of data left a void for planning services.
Natalie added: “The first step in improving the process was to standardise locally commissioned services across Kent and Medway. This was achieved with the Primary Care Quality Standard, which is a standardised bundle of services seeking to improve patient access and outcomes. From there, activity aligned to each service is exported from the clinical system via an automated activity submission which auto-generates an invoice for payment from Contract Manager. This simplified the payment process for practices. Contract Manager also measures record keeping requirements linked to service quality, patient safety and experience, which shapes patient care going forward”.
Establishing a standard across the ICB
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the delivery of many locally commissioned services. To coincide with the recovery of locally commissioned services, and to be digitally innovative, Contract Manager launched in Kent and Medway in 2022. The ICB delivered a six-month Contract Manager implementation programme which started with a familiarisation period followed by live mobilisation. The familiarisation focussed on building confidence to empower practices to transition to a digital process.
The programme engagement included ‘coffee and questions’, PCN meetings, troubleshooting sessions and webinars, with the delivery team at Kent and Medway, and the Apex team at Optum. The purpose was to ensure teams fully understood how Contract Manager could simplify renumeration, whilst at the same time encouraging teams to offer feedback and suggest improvements along the way.
An engaged and enabled workforce
During this period of familiarisation, another advantage was that Kent and Medway embraced cross-organisational working across general practice, along with sharing systems and processes. It fostered a sense of collaboration between the ICB, individual practices, and the Apex team at Optum. This collaboration enhanced patient choice, and improved access to care via the standardised services. It was so significant that Kent and Medway ICB and Apex made it to the finals of HSJ’s Project of the Year award in 2023.
Over the familiarisation process and beyond, there’s been a standout effort of collaboration at all levels and has been completed in a spirit very much aligned to the Fuller Report’s drive to improve efficiency within primary care.”
Ben concluded: “If we’re going to focus on improving patient outcomes, it's vital that we reduce manual bureaucracy wherever possible. Kent and Medway have demonstrated just how powerful data-informed decision making, along with an engaged and enabled workforce, can be when it comes to innovative healthcare."
Because of the huge engagement, Contract Manager has seen the use of all other Apex analytics functions increase by 175% in a year-on-year comparison, which highlights how the time saved through Contract Manager automation can be used to focus on other aspects of quality improvement.”
The analytics from Contract Manager supports general practice workforce planning and operational change. Across the ICS, the analytics informs the redesign of care pathways and services.
This innovation has paved the way to expand the function of Contract Manager to include COVID and Flu Manager, and more recently, an appointment dashboard. The dashboard demonstrates to practices the optimisation of their appointment book and consultation recording in EMIS Web, which will provide further demand and capacity insights, enabling them to improve patient access.