Effective management of the NHS 1.2 million workforce will play a fundamental role in reaching the government’s target of £25 billion productivity savings. To be successful, the NHS must tighten up many of its IT processes and improve automation, which alone is expected to deliver between £12 to £13 billion a year.
The introduction of automation to critical systems, such as people and identity management, will advance the NHS towards efficiency, removing unnecessary swivel chair procedures.
Investment to save costs
Optimising processes and investing in IT solutions are essential in being able to close the digital gaps in NHS operations.
Identity management is a perfect example of where many trusts have not yet built the connections between the HR ESR system that houses the employee’s data, the employee contact details in Active Directory, and the email platform NHSmail.
Records for all employees are held in the ESR and those with emails and telephones, duplicated in Active Directory and NHSmail. An average trust with 8,000 members of staff could end up with 24,000 user profiles in multiple systems. This begins to demonstrate the complexity of having a manual operation.
Add to this is the constant management of account access that is required for an array of other NHS administration and clinical systems, all of which should be centrally controlled to ensure security and compliance.
Does it need to be so complex? Absolutely not.
Looking to an automated future
As systems are being updated, NHS organisations are looking to improve automation. For example, organisations implementing NHSmail should consider adopting Directory Manager to provide seamless integration between ESR, Active Directory and NHSmail, enabling automation of new mailbox creation and updating of records.
Directory Manager provides automated provisioning of new mailboxes in NHSmail via TANsync, and once email addresses for those new mailboxes have been delivered back to Directory Manager by TANsync, updates are made to the local Active Directory account and ESR record. Also, for new recruits with existing NHSmail accounts, Directory Manager allows organisations to implement workflows that guide NHSmail Local Administrators to adopt those existing mailboxes into the organisation.
With this solution in place, the administrative burden of copy/pasting employee details into a variety of systems and setting up individual profiles is removed, as is the reliance on multiple people to update different records. Directory Manager acts as the gateway to ensure that all systems requiring this critical identity information receive up-to-date information in a timely fashion.
Security is critical and by linking the systems together, the NHS removes the possibility of human error or out-of-date information being held in one place.
Inefficient administration tasks and systems, hamper NHS organisations’ management of its people. Identifying these digital gaps is half the challenge for NHS organisations, but they need to be resolved to effectively increase productivity. If accomplished, the NHS will be on the right path to remove inefficiencies and crucially find additional cost-savings to safeguard their future.