The capture of NHS numbers for patients and service users is now a legal requirement in health and social care. CareMotive offer an ITK-accredited Spine Mini-Services Provider (SMSP) to meet this need. Our SMSP is easy to deploy, gives high levels of NHS number capture, and reduces the effort required from the customer. We are helping a number of our customers use the SMSP to solve their NHS number problems, including Ieso Digital Health.
The challenge facing Ieso: Ieso Digital Health provides one-to-one Cognitive Behavioural Therapy online. They need to record NHS numbers of all of their patients for several reasons – for instance, in order to be paid for referred patients. Finding out the NHS number for every patient has previously been a time-consuming process – typically involving telephone calls to the patient’s GP, delayed response or no response from the GP, leading to an average of 20 minutes’ work required per patient and to administrative inconvenience.
What CareMotive provided: CareMotive provided our SMSP as a hosted application, requiring no extra hardware footprint at Ieso. Our SMSP web client gives Ieso staff secure access to the service, using a simple interactive interface to input the five key demographic fields (given name, family name, date of birth, gender, postcode),and to retrieve the NHS number within seconds. Other data such as the GP practice (including contact details) and date of death can be returned from the spine. If – as can arise from of simple data errors – the first search does not succeed, Ieso staff can rapidly alter the search criteria, to find a match in a very high proportion of cases [quantify!]. Ieso can also use the web interface to submit batches of patient records, using our Smart+Search technology to ensure high success rates without manual retries.
What are the benefits to Ieso? Ieso are now using the SMSP to look up NHS numbers for every patient, and are exploring how to use the SMSP features to further streamline the process. They have achieved the following benefits so far:
- Very high proportion of NHS numbers captured through the SMSP, without recourse to other methods
- Rapid turnaround with no long administrative delays
- Major reduction in the staff time required to retrieve NHS numbers
- Ease of use – staff can learn to use the SMSP web interface within minutes
- Ease of deployment – through any web browser, with no impact on Ieso’s hardware estate
- Confirmation and enrichment of entered demographic data, from Spine data
Ieso’s Assessment: “It used to be so time consuming trying to get hold of NHS Numbers, often involving ringing or even faxing GP surgeries; but that’s a thing of the past now that we can look up the NHS Number directly using CareMotive’s SMSP Web App.”
Can we help you with NHS Number Capture? Using CareMotive’s SMSP, the capture of NHS numbers for health and social care need not be expensive or time-consuming. You can achieve much higher success rates with SMSP than with the NHS batch services – because if any match fails through issues in the demographic data, loosening the search criteria for that particular record to find a match is under your control. Turnaround is instant. Rates of failure from NHS batch services with typical data quality may be as high as one in three- which is not acceptable to most providers. Using our SMSP you can typically achieve success rates of 90% or more with the same data. Using our Smart+Search intelligent search strategies with SMSP, you can achieve these success rates without the costs of manual retries.