NHS Trust + Celonis

University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust has prevented thousands of appointment cancellations and significantly improved their operational efficiency using Celonis.

With an annual budget of £190 billion and 1.3 million members of staff, the NHS is one of the world's leading health services. It's also the second-largest single-payer healthcare system in the world, and free at the point of delivery.

But while it is a source of great national pride, the service is under considerable pressure. Like all healthcare services, it was hit hard by the pandemic, and is moreover facing a growing backlog of patients. The adoption of new technologies has become an essential element in bouncing back, while tackling the organizational complexity of the service.

That's why University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust, one of more than 200 trusts that make up the NHS, turned to data, and eventually Celonis.

Better care, faster, by reducing patient waiting lists

“Since the Covid pandemic, we've had workforce and financial challenges, but one of our biggest challenges is the number of patients now waiting for treatment,” says Dan Hayes. The Director of Performance and Informatics heads a team of 200 individuals, whose primary objective is to optimize hospital resources, enhance operational efficiency, and maintain high standards of patient care — all while meeting strict confidentiality requirements.

Through a partnership with IBM, the team came to know Celonis — and the Celonis platform became a key solution to tackling their challenges.

There are 7.58 million appointments in the NHS backlog. Previously, UHCW NHS Trust would send patients text message reminders four days before, and then the day before their appointment. However, last-minute cancellations kept coming in, and so appointments went unused and waiting lists only got longer.

Thanks to the Process Intelligence provided by Celonis, the Trust understood that four days was not enough time to reallocate last-minute cancellations effectively. They made a subtle adjustment. They now text 14 days prior as well as 4 days before the appointment. In doing so, they are successfully educating patients to cancel appointments early on if something comes up, and the hospital gets more time to fill slots that become available, making a dent in their waiting lists.

“The results are incredible!”

For a subset of patients visiting the Outpatients department, the DNA (Did Not Attend) rate fell from 10% to 4.4% in just one week, avoiding 1,800 appointment cancellations. The waiting list went from 73,100 to 67,780 patients within eight weeks, a reduction of around 5,300 patients. Dan Hayes describes it as “incredible”. This reduction has been continuous since they implemented the changes they identified using Celonis.

Another effective way of reducing waiting times and improving the patient experience is to group medical appointments. With Celonis, UHCW NHS Trust could see that 12,000 patients followed more than one care pathway, meaning they were waiting for more than one treatment. The NHS Trust also observed that 53,000 patients over an 18-month period went to the hospital more than once in five days. If these appointments were grouped, so that patients had several appointments on the same day, hospital visits would be cut by 53%, and also reduce the carbon footprint by 29 tonnes.

“Often, people need to see a number of different specialists,” explains Andy Hardy. “Now we can use Celonis to help us align all their appointments on the same day, rather than having them come on multiple days. Or, as often happens, if it’s parents and children, siblings, husband and wife, etc., we can schedule their appointments on the same day so they don't have to make multiple trips. This is the power of the Celonis platform.”

Today, UHCW NHS Trust aims to use Celonis’ object-centric process mining (OCPM) capabilities to get a dynamic, three-dimensional view of their in-theater and out-of-theater surgery processes.

With OCPM and the Process Intelligence Graph, companies can easily connect various systems and processes to get an end-to-end digital twin of their processes and understand their business performance. In this case, the NHS Trust can analyze the patient journey from different angles — accounting for factors like lab results, drugs administered, surgery sessions scheduled, anesthesiologists on-call, etc. — to identify the roadblocks that lead to surgery delays or last-minute cancellations.

“Operating theaters represent some of the hospital's most costly resources, so optimizing their use is crucial,” explains Andy Hardy. “But more importantly, the more patients we're seeing each and every operating session, the quicker we can reduce the backlog of patients we've got.”

The idea is to use Celonis to optimize bed occupancy by managing rotations much more effectively. As a result, a greater number of patients can be treated more quickly, especially those in need of urgent care. “OCPM enabled us to analyze the sequence of a patient's steps - from different angles - and to understand the reasons why surgeries were starting late,” says Dan Hayes. “We were able to look at things in a way we'd never imagined before.”

What the NHS Trust is doing with Celonis has been recognized nationally: in the Health Service Journal (HSJ) Partnership Awards 2024, the project won the Best Healthcare Analytics Project category for using analytics to increase patient efficiency and effective care, and also the bronze award in the Best Elective Care recovery Initiative category for the use of data.