Patient Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS)
With the current drive for £10bn of efficiency savings to be made across the NHS, it is important that Trusts understand their expenditure so that they do not cut out care when making these savings.

Patient Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS) directly link the costs of a patient’s care, in a clinically meaningful way, to the activity and resources that the patient consumes. This allows Trusts to identify where overspending occurs, and where effective savings can be made.

These costing systems are unique to each Trust, and their implementation is a lengthy process - Avoca Health Informatics Professionals have the skill mix needed to support Trust’s throughout the implementation of PLICS.

PLICS Implementation – What can Avoca do?
The implementation of PLICS is a long and involved process that requires gaining a complete understanding of the Trust, the financial and patient systems and the expenditure and activity that the Trust anticipates, so that the correct interaction between activity and cost can be established.

Avoca Health Informatics Professionals can use their knowledge and experience of the NHS to help Trusts understand and successfully implement PLICS into their organisation. Our skills, outlined below, will be an invaluable asset to any Trust during PLICS implementation.

 
Avoca’s Health Informatics knowledge can help the implementation of PLICS in a number of ways:

• Our excellent understanding of relational database systems allows us to understand your current systems and envisage how they can work together to create the detailed level of information required within PLICS.

• Our understanding of patient flows and patient episodic information, in both theoretical and practical terms, will allow us to comprehend the way this information is stored in Trust data. As well as understanding how multiple systems can be used to create a PLICS that ensures costing can be broken down on many different levels. For example, splitting costs by patient journey, by treatment, by care provider or by speciality.
Our training in NHS commissioning, HRGs and reference costs also give us an in-depth understanding of the financial information that is required for Trusts, and for PLICS to be useable at this level.

• Interfacing and Integration of systems
Avoca’s experience of system integration will enable us to understand how the multiple source systems of a Trust interact, putting us in an ideal position to help identify how to integrate the systems that are required within PLICS.
Along with our knowledge of Data Warehousing

• Data quality – identifying issues and resolutions
Data quality is particularly important in PLICS, as data irregularities can significantly affect the worth of costing information that will be produced. Avoca’s vast experience with data quality can help you reconcile your information, and suggest methods to improve data quality by successfully identifying data anomalies, outliers and integrity problems and providing you with workable solutions to these issues.

• Experience with NHS Reporting
Our experience with NHS reporting helps us to know what it the relevant factors of reporting are. This will allow us to focus on how PLICS can be effectively used to create meaningful and useful information for both clinicians and management.

• Project management
As discussed on our Informatics page, an Avoca Health Informatics Professional are also well versed in project management, and can help to produce a strategy that is bespoke to your situation, allowing you to successfully manage and deliver your project.