The Company

University College London Hospitals (UCLH) is one of the largest NHS Trusts in the UK. With an annual turnover of ?340 million and around 4600 employees, the Trust comprises 8 major teaching hospitals including the Heart Hospital and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, and provides everything from an Accident & Emergency service at University College Hospital to world famous brain surgery at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery. UCL Hospitals support the Royal Free and UCL Medical School and the associated Schools and Institutes that play leading roles in the development of medical education and research making UCLH one of the UK leaders in education, training and research.

The background

Due to its size and importance within the NHS, UCLH was one of the first London Trusts to be allowed to create its own financial system, installing and managing software and hardware in house. A systematic search and review of several products was performed to select a suitable strategic tool for creating the new financial system. With their accounting background their main requirement was for an easy to use, modular package.

Tasos Yerolemides, who has been with UCLH for 15 years and is Head of Financial Systems, recalls; "We quickly realised that DataEase offered an extraordinary intuitive approach to problem solving. We purchased a licence for research purposes and it impressed every member of the team so we adopted it. It was an easy product to understand allowing progressive development and quick deployment stand alone and as a LAN application. All development work could be completed with the use of one set of programming knowledge."

Since its introduction in 1992 DataEase has been used to develop a considerable number of applications. One of the most impressive developments was PRIMARY, an Accounts Payable system. Others included Fixed Assets Accounting, Purchase Order & Stock Control, Planning Purchasing and Payments Ordering, and a Transport System. Tasos continues: "We developed various applications which became essential to the production of the Trust's Final Accounts. DataEase has been an integral instrument for the provision of management information and indeed the key software used in the Finance department."

The Challenge

In April 2003 UCLH adopted Oracle Financials as a standard integrated financial system to manage their Accounts. The big challenge was: would this be the end of DataEase? Not in the least. They soon found that they required a flexible interface to interact with Oracle so DataEase was the tool they chose to provide most of the interfaces.

Tasos and Steve Hypolite, network manager, created a number of data conversion routines from DataEase to Oracle, to offer a structured approach to data processing. These included Monthly and Weekly Payroll, Monthly and Weekly Worked Time Equivalent, Pharmacy Stores Issues, Agency Nursing Charges and a number of others linking straight into Oracle General Ledger.

In addition to these routines, a number of new DataEase applications have been developed to allow increased efficiency in the financial department including a Cheque Register, a Year End - NHS Debt Accounting System, Pharmacy Payments going to Oracle Accounts Payable, Pharmacy Billing System going to Oracle Accounts Receivable module, and STAR - Pathology billing system going to Oracle Accounts Receivable module.

Thus DataEase has continued to be used for UCLH's application development. Tasos explains: "Despite the introduction of an integrated financial system, opportunities remained in many areas for a strategic development tool such as DataEase to continue providing professional and efficient turnkey applications. DataEase provides an excellent bridge between operational needs and data integration with the main system. It is therefore used as a strategic tool to provide the flexibility needed in other departments responsible for the provision of feeder information."

WebPublisher 2

Having proved its staying power in the face of a high-level standard enterprise system, DataEase is now becoming even more invaluable to UCLH with its new web-publishing feature. Tasos and Steve are on the final stages of publishing key parts of their STAR application on the Web.

STAR is a transaction intensive pathology application providing a detail analysis of all tests (about 6,000 per day) completed by all laboratories. It was developed and implemented using the latest version of DataEase in just 6 months, and provides an electronic interface between the Pathology Administration system (Sun Quest) and Oracle Account Receivables. It is accessed by three main departments: Pathology, Financial Systems and Income (Sales); receiving and filtering every test produced on a daily basis, obeying a series of business rules and the integration of billing activity to Oracle Financials.

As a number of departments and hospitals still use a paper based system to enter manual bills/invoices for the pathology tests required, WebPublisher 2 will eliminate the paperwork involved giving each department and hospital the autonomy to enter data directly into STAR. Consequently it will diminish the demand on data entry from paper invoices, reduce duplication of effort, improve efficiency and eliminate input errors.

The outcome

Tasos concludes: "UCLH like many other large organisations is always challenged to improve efficiency. In the Finance world, we became aware a long time ago, that one way to contribute towards it, is to avoid duplication of effort, and DataEase gave us that."

"It is a powerful and easy to understand product which allows us to develop turnkey applications without the need to learn and use other tools or programming languages. Once developers have gained the necessary expertise, DataEase can be relied upon to provide a business solution for any business needs."

As this Case Study is being finalised UCLH is starting a new project called "OPERA", an application which will be installed in six different hospitals to record all monies collected from private patients. Patient treatment will vary from day episodes to complex in patient episodes icluding surgery. The project will be implemented in two phases. Phase 1 will be implemented in November 2003 and Phase 2 in January 2004. Phase 1 will deal with the recording of income received from all day cases. The income is in relation to pathology, x-ray and various other tests carried out at UCLH.

The main outputs include:
a) the issuing of an invoice to be given to the patient following payment.
b) an interface to the General Ledger to keep accounts posted with generated income; and
c) As private patient activity involves a charge that consist of a hospital and a specialist fee, OPERA will facilitate the distribution of cash to specialist.

Phase 2 will take care of all in patient activity charges, and income distribution.

Several other users will be given access via WebPublisher to make enquiries.