The Statement of Planned Benefits. In addition to efficiency savings derived from paperless working, UHBristol expects to gain substantial safety and quality benefits from the use of the new digital functionality. It has not yet been possible to assign a direct value to these particular benefits because they cannot be accurately quantified in terms of, for example, the reduction in serious incidents or variation requiring investigation by senior clinical and administrative staff and the associated costs thereof. We will commit to maintaining a detailed baseline and benefits/savings monitoring regime as part of the transformation activity that will be an integral part of the programme. We also request that NHSE and NHS Digital assists in this particular area by providing a national lead in defining the formulae by which benefits can be calculated for the avoidance of morbidity, mortality and their associated unwanted impacts. UHBristol is fortunate in that it has already commenced work in many of the functional areas that can traditionally render significant cash-releasing and efficiency savings and has achieved a high performance baseline in many areas. This affects our benefits case by reducing the scope and scale of the benefits available to be realised—the aphorism that ‘one can only thresh the harvest once’ applies in this area—and we have also accounted for some benefits yet to be realised. For example, the roll-out of our electronic casenote management system and development of an advanced electronic prescribing and meds administration system are well underway but, unfortunately, these particular projects were subject to tech funding and their associated benefits have already been ‘harvested’ and are therefore not available under GDE. The SOPB is submitted in draft form at this stage and we commit to refine and agree the content with benefit owners and NHS Digital colleagues by end of March 2017.
