Prudent Procurement Provides For Enhanced Patient Care

Aldermaston, Berkshire: In a climate of criticism one NHS Trust is sitting comfortably, as the report into NHS expenditure is released today. Basingstoke and North Hampshire NHS Foundation Trust cut their procurement spend in early 2010, and have already implemented the £300,000 worth of savings they identified using the same technology that frames the National Audit Office’s report.  The NAO report titled: The procurement of consumables by NHS hospital trusts also used Berkshire based @UK Plc’s technology in their analysis and report.  

 

“Budget cuts provided an opportunity for us to prune spend and redirect savings into new services. The SpendInsight run immediately recouped our costs,  in one of over 150 categories analysed – Cannulas – where we identified an instant saving of over £7000,” said Tammie Purdue, Head of Purchasing and Supplies, Basingstoke and North Hampshire NHS Foundation Trust.

 

The Trust’s initial savings ran to about £300,000 meaning that savings on consumables such as white paper and surgical gloves could be redirected into investment in staff and life-saving technologies that could enhance patient care.

 

@UK PLC’s SpendInsight, an online analysis tool powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), interrogates procurement data and reveals areas of overspend, maverick spend and opportunities for significant cost savings. The product is the outcome of a three year Knowledge Transfer Partnership involving the University of Reading, Goldsmiths’ University of London, Coding International and @UK Plc. The programme requires no manual intervention and is quick to deliver comprehensive reports eliminating the need for protracted data analysis consultations and the employment of teams of highly-paid data analysts.

 

SpendInsight also highlighted numerous areas where the Basingstoke and North Hampshire NHS Foundation Trust was already outperforming the benchmark. “We gather benchmarking data anonymously and review a customer’s procurement spend against it. Benchmarking is vital as it can also reveal opportunities for organisations to collaborate and procure on a better price point,” said Ronald Duncan, Chairman of @UK Plc.  In the past three years, @UK PLC has analysed over £100 billion worth of procurement spend, making the database, with over 3.6 million benchmarked items, the most comprehensive in the UK.

 

ENDS ###                                /over