Challenges Facing Your Organisation
- Experiencing issues with addressing the backlog of elective care and cancer wait lists
- Searching for a different way to manage urgent care demand and bed capacity
- Needing strategies to sustainably improve patient outcomes and cost efficiency
- Working to develop your integrated care offering
- Struggling with high numbers of staff turnover and vacancies
Understanding patient demand
To meet current and future challenges, health and social care providers must be prepared to think and act in innovative ways to achieve both service transformation and system integration. Our approach is tangibly different than conventional methods...
Our improvement methodology first studies, then redesigns health and social care services through the lens of patients, not on episodic activity or income levels. By studying health and social care through the lens of the patient, we can develop a comprehensive understanding of service performance in a new and innovative way. This allows for evidence-based redesign that delivers improved patient outcomes and can reduce costs.
When studied this way, the reality is patient numbers remain stable but uneven. Small numbers of patients in every health and social care economy, which we call the ‘vital few’, consume disproportionately high levels of service activity and costs, not because of age or condition profile as is commonly assumed, but because pre-defined pathways and processes do not meet their needs. They are not traditional patients who will benefit from standard approaches.
A Patient-Centric Approach
Our approach starts by examining demand in patient terms and identifying the ‘vital few’ patients who are behind performance challenges and operating deficits. By analysing patterns of demand, we can ascertain how best to reduce operational processes that lead to sub-optimal outcomes.
Who Are The ‘Vital Few’?
- They comprise 5% of every health and social care economy
- They consume up to 30% of activity and 40% costs
- They are behind all performance challenges and 40-100% of operating deficits
- They are geographically clustered within a small number of localities
Achievable Benefits
- Optimal patient outcomes – The right patients are seen in the right place, at the right time, by the right person
- Reduced health inequality – Barriers to providing tailored services are removed, and service configurations are flexible to meet the needs of patients
- Reduced high-cost presentations – Cohorts of patients most likely to present are identified and proactively managed, reducing the likelihood of high-cost presentations, quickly demonstrating examples of cost saving
- Improved quality of services – Enabling safer care and improved staff and patient experience through focusing on a balanced scorecard of metrics and targeting improvement efforts
- Establishing a return on investment – Making changes for small groups of people (e.g., intervention thresholds, service pathways, scheduling processes) makes a big difference in terms of cost savings to the service
Techniques & Phases
Our approach fuses both qualitative and quantitative data techniques to understand the root causes of health and social care performance issues and associated cost challenges. Working alongside staff, patient-centred proof of concepts are designed, trialled and scaled to achieve new, sustainable ways of working. This leads to cost-effective transformation of operating models and reduced patient demand through more preventative systems.
The work is split into 3 phases: Research, Redesign and Roll in. Your staff will be fully involved at each stage and supported to understand the processes required to roll in and sustain changes. This provides a tangible investment into the work they undertake daily and can lead to an improvement in morale. By working collaboratively, we enable a deeper understanding of the issues faced and how to design services that work for patients.
BearingPoint’s Health & Social Care Team
Our team possesses extensive experience, knowledge and skills across the health and social care system. From acute to social care; operations management to quality improvement; data analytics to programme leadership. We have all previously worked within the NHS and local public services, and so have a comprehensive understanding and knowledge of system challenges and opportunities. We share a firm belief that doing the right thing for patients creates the most effective, efficient and sustainable health and social care systems.
