Andrew Tunnicliffe, Associate Director – Elective Care, Stockport NHS Foundation Trust
“The Trust identified a cohort of Non-RTT patients that needed to be validated to understand the requirement for follow up appointments. When we had confirmed the volume of pathways involved we realised that checking them manually would not be feasible given the 4 critical factors identified by our Trust steering committee:
- Time – Speed was critical given any potential safety risk – completion in weeks not months
- Resource – Finding enough people, attracting them and training them would not be practical
- Budget –Funding was not readily available and obtaining it would bring unacceptable delay
- Execution – Given the context, accuracy levels were of the highest importance
ROVA automatically read over 900,000 documents and identified an outcome for 70% of circa 80,000 referrals, with a removal rate of 46% through the automatic identification of discharged referrals. ROVA was deployed in 6 weeks and can process 500,000 documents per day.
The Trust concluded that a manual validation exercise of this type would take approximately 6 months with team of 10 people and cost us upwards of £400k.
Sustainability is a key driver for the Trust and wider use of ROVA will allow us to further improve removal rates and productivity gains – reducing our costs of manual validation”
