NHS Scotland signs financial analytics contract with Advanced

NHS Scotland has signed a four-year deal with software provider Advanced with the aim of making financial reporting quicker and more efficient. 

Advanced already supplies NHS Scotland with a financial management system, eFinancials, for a range of services across Scotland’s 22 health boards.

eFinancials interfaces with a number of NHS Scotland’s procurement, payroll and payment systems.

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The new £360,000 contract will see Advanced delivering a business analytics application in partnership with IBM, which is due to go live in August 2016.

Colin White, national finance systems manager at NHS Scotland, said that tests had suggested that reports could be generated “significantly quicker – with some reports generating results in seconds rather than hours”.

The new system, which will act as a gateway between eFinancials and a business intelligence system for financial reports, will provide analysts and accountants with access to real-time data without affecting the live operational database.

White said that, because the system replicates data in real-time, it will be up-to-date and can be retrieved around 50 to 500 times faster.

“By speeding up report production and improving access to real-time data, staff will spend less time on report running and more time on analysing the information produced,” White said.

“With data readily available at our fingertips, we will be able to use that information for more informed analysis, enabling us to drive performance across the entire organisation.”