BMC Helix Transforms Service and Experience for Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Improving patient outcomes and relieving pressure

Northumbria NHS Foundation Trust is among the largest healthcare organizations geographically in the U.K., with around 12,000 employees (plus hundreds of contractors and other agency staff). The Trust serves around 500,000 people in northeast England.

Delivering a full range of health services across 10 main sites, including an emergency care hospital, general and community hospitals, and other facilities, the Trust seeks to improve patient outcomes and relieve pressure on its people and processes.

In support of those aims, the Digital Services team at the Trust provides operational systems for all clinical and non-clinical staff. “We directly underpin patient services,” says Glen Foster, Head of Service Delivery at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. “All improvements in our speed and efficiency deliver results direct to patients.”

Nevertheless, many legacy systems and contact center-based help desks were cumbersome and costly to operate. The Trust lacked visibility into its IT infrastructure due to reliance on paper-based form scanning for operations. In addition, it did not provide the insight needed to operate seamlessly and help administrative and medical staff adapt to advanced IT-based facilities, which prevented them from reaching the best care standards.

While the Trust had always intended to digitize the end-user experience, COVID-19 accelerated that goal, shifting to a hybrid environment partly staffed by a remote clinical workforce. In the space of just six weeks, the Trust went from planning processes to moving staff onto BMC digital IT systems, whether working on-premises or remotely. Those solutions empowered IT staff to manage and maintain all devices in-house, enabling the Trust to deploy 2,500 remote workstations in the same period.

The Trust initially invested in BMC Helix Digital Workplace and BMC Helix IT Service Management (ITSM) to address challenges, later expanding to include additional BMC capabilities, making the service delivery team a center of excellence.

Foster recalls: “BMC Helix ITSM was our service management product of choice because BMC was the single vendor that stood apart. BMC was completely committed to understanding our challenges and helped us address issues through process improvement, not just further IT investment. We appreciated that approach.”

The Digital Services team created a “Beyond Outstanding” program to ensure IT innovations improve efficiency across healthcare and corporate functions. Teams like HR, finance, logistics, and facilities management now use BMC Helix enhancements such as BMC Helix Business Workflows, BMC Helix Discovery, and BMC Helix for HR Service Management.

Additional benefits include improved patient processing times, real-time decisions, and secure authorizations from any device. The reduction of manual processes and elimination of paper has improved service level agreements (SLAs) by 90 percent. Authorizations can happen anywhere, anytime, on a mobile device or PC.

Considerable time savings and efficiencies are also achieved with a single, consolidated platform. Foster explains: “Huge numbers of tasks don’t need human interaction; they can simply be delivered. We’ve formed a [BMC Helix] Digital Workplace team with business analysts to design end-to-end process automations.”

The workforce is enthusiastic about the transformed user experience. Gen Z new hires expect service on par with Amazon, which the BMC Helix platform delivers. Call volumes to the help desk are reduced when patients and staff can manage their own requests. This ensures only priority needs get priority attention, driving a 400 percent increase in usage of the BMC Helix Digital Workplace platform.

Meanwhile, self-service through the portal, automatic incident routing, and better internal business workflow management have improved customer satisfaction by 19 percent, while the internal Staff Pulse survey rose to 9.1 out of ten.

In HR alone, over 44,000 hours are saved (equivalent to eight full-time employees), allowing staff to focus on higher-value work. Recruitment managers save significant onboarding time previously dedicated to manual tasks. The platform has saved over 152,000 hours annually across the 15,000-strong workforce, achieving a return on investment (ROI) of £1 (USD $1.2) million in the first three years. Within five years, the Trust plans to transition to a cloud-first, automated strategy supported by BMC solutions. Foster concludes: “We can deliver as fast as the IT systems can handle it, moving faster than humanly possible.”

A BMC-powered self-service portal has ensured most IT cases are resolved through real-time problem identification and resolution without the need for service desk intervention. This enables automation and customization of the employee experience through embedded intelligence, common data sets, and standard user interfaces.

The Digital Services team now has a single record of all operations and can create, customize, and modify workflows by employee type and individual profile. The positive impact on the workforce cannot be underestimated. From new joiners through to movers and leavers, all stages of the employee lifecycle have been transformed.

Embedded media-rich BMC Helix Knowledge Management offers omnichannel access across employee locations. In acknowledgment of this achievement, the Trust has been commended for its award-winning teams and individuals dedicated to delivering exceptional care.

“We’ve already improved care levels—now we aim to build out trust rating beyond outstanding and see what digital transformation can deliver,” says Foster. “With BMC, we’ve been able to create a whole new way of thinking and working across the entire Trust. We’ve actually moved from IT service management to enterprise service management.”