HPMA Award for ‘best use of your ESR’ scooped by valued Cohort Software customer
HPMA (Healthcare People Management Association) Excellence Awards which is held annually, recognise and reward outstanding work in healthcare human resource management.
‘Transforming Hire to Retire Processes across NHS Wales’ was shortlisted for the ‘Award for best use of Your ESR’ category in this year’s HPMA awards for which they went on to win. NHS Wales were able to demonstrate significant opportunities for standardising processes, providing more efficient services and lowering costs.
The set criteria for this award category is that initiatives must demonstrate how an organisation’s effective use of their Electronic Staff Record system (ESR) is helping them to support their business objectives and deliver service improvements.
Prior to this project there was significant variation in the use of OH systems and processes. Duplicate data was substantial and had many inconsistencies. There was no standardisation of data sets and processes were paper-based. These issues combined to result in significant delays within Occupational Health.
Working with Cohort and the ESR team to best utilise the ESR-bi-directional interface, NHS Wales have increased the efficiency of their high standard service and realised many benefits in the process.
Helen Thomas, Deputy ESR Programme Director for NHS Wales commented;
“The success of this project required collaboration across 3 large NHS Wales organisations, the occupational health provider Medgate UK and the NHS ESR interface team to implement a cost effective solution that clearly demonstrated service improvements through a 2 way interface between ESR and the NHS Wales occupational health system, Cohort.
We were delighted with the level of commitment and continued support from the team at Medgate UK throughout this project.
This project has enabled significant opportunities for standardising processes, providing more efficient services and lowering recruitment costs by removing much of the delay in occupational health (OH) clearance and manually dependant processes, specifically realising the following benefits:
- Standardisation and embedding of robust operating processes between occupational health and recruitment
- An 80% reduction in duplication of data entry for occupational health administration teams
- Occupational health process steps have been reduced by approximately 20%
- Establishment of standard data sets, significantly reducing variation
- Portability has been enabled resulting in pre-employment data being available to occupational health at an earlier stage in the recruitment process
- Time savings of 23,835 hours per annum within occupational health and recruitment processes
- Cost efficiencies of approximately £40K per annum across the pilot organisations
- Avoidance of the sending of approximately 3,000 clearance emails per annum as a result of ESR workflow notifications
The Occupational Health project is one of several modernisation projects that comprises the ESR ‘Hire to Retire’ work plan which is executively sponsored by Hazel Robinson, NWSSP Workforce & OD Director”.
