Berkshire & Surrey Pathology Services Embraces the Value of Relationship Management

The increasing commercialisation of pathology services means there is an increasing need to consider service differentiation, competitive advantage and value added service offerings.

Berkshire & Surrey Pathology Services (BSPS) have long understood that the service provider that strengthens their relationship and communication with clinicians, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and end users of their service will have a clear advantage. With this in mind, BSPS have deployed CliniSys | MIPS’ Pathology Relationship Management (PRM) solution.

The customer relationship management tools, collaboration centre, and real-time analytics within PRM are providing BSPS with organisation, provider and patient relationship profiles based on ordering and service activity and other metrics. These profiles are enabling BSPS to further enhance their service levels, improve operational efficiency, quality, and drive personalised engagement with the users of their service.

Nicola Newman, Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Service’s Chief Operating Officer comments “Being able to provide our end users with a high quality pathology service with excellent customer care is of paramount importance. Our previous disparate and standalone systems installed across our numerous hospital sites were labour intensive to manage and difficult to pull together the necessary data. PRM gives us a fully integrated and real-time view of service performance and governance across all our organizations and laboratory sites in a central location. Having the ability to remotely access live data in a user definable display of key metrics is a significant advantage as it allows us to be proactive in responding to our service users and enables a better coordination of resources.”

NHS Trusts in England are actively working towards the formation of 29 pathology networks as proposed by NHS Improvement in order to make pathology services more efficient and deliver better value, high quality care for patients. BSPS has already adopted many of the guiding principles proposed by NHSI and sees PRM as an essential tool supporting cross-site managerial roles by readily providing the teams with essential real-time data. Pathology networks by their nature are complex and BSPS is no exception covering five main acute hospital sites, numerous CCGs along with private contracts. PRM will ensure that each area is proactively and effectively managed and that vital oversight is never lost.  Although the parameters of the NHSI productivity & quality dashboard are under review, PRM is already delivering the necessary output and is flexible enough to support future changes.

Nicola Newman continues, “PRM has the ability to create and automate campaigns to help engage and educate clinicians and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in appropriate ordering of pathology tests. PRM will provide a significant benefit as we are dedicated to supporting our users in appropriate test requesting but also to support demand management initiatives to drive down inappropriate test requesting.”

With a central, integrated and live view of data, BSPS will be able to map lessons learnt across all departments and organizations in support of best practice workflows.  To further a more customer-focused approach, BSPS is now able to offer their service users a single point of contact for general enquiries and PRM supports the necessary call logging.

Pathology Relationship Management is providing BSPS with a number of significant benefits including:

Service utilisation and trend analysis identifying service usage improvements, issue trends and root causes to prevent future issue re-occurrences and reducing unnecessary costs

The automation of real-time alerts and notifications to provide information on issues relevant to operational effectiveness and service centre excellence

Histopathology dashboards monitoring and managing consultant reporting which are helping to drive greater efficiencies

Enhanced support for “cancer pathways” with improved granularity of reporting across each site

Improvement of customer satisfaction levels by proactively tracking and monitoring issues, complaints and non-conformance records

Introduction of demand management by analysing ordering trends and educating users appropriately to reduce inappropriate and duplicate testing

Nicola Newman concludes “CliniSys | MIPS’ PRM solution is helping us to address current and future operational, quality and business challenges. Having the facility for on demand and live analytics which can identify performance trends across all laboratories is an enormous advantage and is already leading to operational improvements”.

Simon Hurst, CliniSys | MIPS Commercial Director comments “Berkshire & Surrey Pathology Service is an extremely progressive organization who are committed to continuously improve and innovate their service offerings. We have a longstanding working relationship with BSPS and are delighted to be working with the team on another service transformation project. We have partnered with hc1.com to deliver a cloud based purpose built pathology relationship management solution, that will enable BSPS to deliver the highest level of service to their customers. I believe that PRM will deliver a step change for the BSPS pathology IT ecosystem”.