Healthcare finance innovation

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is on the lookout for a tech company to help the Trust improve its finance operations. The Trust and its charity CW+ are inviting expressions of interest from companies whose technologies can generate improvements in four different areas:

• Transactional processes

• MI and reporting

• Customer and supplier services

• Risk management

The call is aimed at start-ups, SMEs and larger corporations, who have until 2 September 2018 to submit their expressions. 

The new finance initiative is part of the charity’s innovation programme aimed at identifying new innovations and technologies to support and improve processes and ways of working. The initiative, which is set to focus first on back office solutions and then move towards patient-facing services, is open to innovations that are either ready to be deployed or might need to be adapted for healthcare settings. 

“We’ve only just started working together, but it’s something that I’ve been interested in for the last six to 12 months,” said Sandra Easton, the Trust’s Chief Financial Officer. “One of the things that I decided quite early on when starting this programme is, there are lots of things out there, AI robotics (…), but what I want to do is create a centre of excellence where we build the skills and capacity and capability in-house."

Easton said the project team at the Trust had already started working on what 'they would like these solutions to be'.

“As soon as we have a partner in place, we will be hitting the ground running and we hope to get this out quite quickly to not lose the momentum that we’ve got at the moment," the CFO added. 

According to the charity, priority will be given providers with a strong presence in the capital, an ability to integrate with other IT systems at the Trust and a ‘record of disruption in any industry’. Successful applicants will be invited to meet a panel of C-level executives led by Easton.

“Working with our Trust’s CFO and finance team is an excellent opportunity for our Charity’s innovation efforts to expand into non-clinical domains," said Chris Chaney, CW+ Chief Executive Officer. "We are delighted to be supporting this initiative and facilitating further collaborations between demand and supply side partners."

The Trust has recently received an ‘outstanding’ rating for its use of resources following an NHS Improvement inspection carried out at the beginning of the year.  

Source: CW+