Atos Consulting, the business consulting arm of Atos Origin, is working with NHS organisations to benchmark their back-office services.
The deal comes as the NHS Shared Services Development Network reached an agreement with Atos Consulting to provide a 12 month programme covering the full scope of back-office services, including ICT, HR and finance, to its members.
Neil Swanwick, director of Derwent shared services, said: “The programme will help us to improve our services through identification of best practices as well as demonstrate to our customers, the front-line health providers, that we represent value-for-money.
“We are already competing with the private sector for the provision of some support activities so benchmarking against them provides an important reality check and fact-based, rather than analogous comparison. Where we are not competitive on price, the Atos Consulting approach helps us to identify areas for improvement.”
Any NHS organisation can subscribe to the service. However, to participate in the founder group programme, trusts will need to contact Atos Consulting before the first quarter’s round of data collection ends on 10 March.
Ian Malcolm, associate partner at Atos Consulting, said, “We are seeing increasing demand for benchmarking ‘back-office’ operations in the public sector in response to the government’s push towards value-for-money.
“Shared services and outsourced service providers are the obvious targets, although I can see other non-shared service organisation, Foundation Trusts and those seeking that status, joining the programme as part of their continuous improvement programme.”
He added that their benchmarking methodology, web-based tools programme has quarterly milestones designed to manage data collection.
“In addition this deal will add increasingly detailed levels of comparison; focused exchanges with other organisations around service metrics, and the delivery and process improvement should provide additional insight.”
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