Southampton University Hospitals Trust (SUHT) is a 1400 bed acute Trust providing general acute and regional specialist services across five sites, the primary site being Southampton General.

Managing the delivery of information to the Trust managers and to the NHS involves the collection, processing and analysis of large amounts of information and occupies more than 15 full time staff in the Corporate Information Services (CIS) department.

Richard Brooker, Head of Information at SUHT, said:

"Like most Trust Information Departments, we were finding it difficult to keep up with the demands for internal and external information. Our original systems were not designed to provide the flexibility or speed of response now expected by our managers, the NHS and the Department of Health regional office.

We asked Bidetime Ltd to help by designing a central source of Information, initially for Waiting List management. Our existing processes required the involvement of a number of staff and it was usually a couple of days before we had the "first cut" figures ready for review.

Intelligent Warehouse has reduced this to a couple of hours, and has enabled us to get a better view on the dynamics of the elective list as well as providing powerful analysis tools to enable staff to identify and explore potential problem areas.

With Bidetime, we've extended the system to provide information on outpatients, inpatient activity and bed availability and occupancy. More importantly, we can "join up" these data sets to give us visibility of how changes in one area, for example clinic patterns, impact our ability to deliver to target. We are now looking at providing a "performance ratio" view for consultants as part of the review process for Clinical Governance.

Intelligent Warehouse plugs the gaps found in traditional, activity based systems and we now have a complete view of the process of "Getting Patients Treated". Simply, we can now provide timely and accurate information to our managers and clinicians to help them manage the Trust more efficiently and effectively"