NHS GP IT Futures: national billing
Automated tri-party billing on Odoo for 200 product lines, 70 suppliers and 6,500 GP practices, processing over £100m per year.
NHS Digital needed a usage and time-based billing solution to automate tri-party billing for the GP IT Futures programme - invoicing 200 product lines from 70 suppliers to 6,500 GP practices.
The predecessor process relied on spreadsheet data submitted to the finance team for aggregation and load, with forecasted invoices issued ahead of time and retrospective debit or credit adjustments applied when actual data arrived. NHS Digital did not want a standard implementation of an invoicing package; they wanted a solution to the problem.
Open Digital provided the design leadership and delivery direction for the programme, working from concept through to live service.
The work
The solution was built on Odoo Community Edition, designed to process the highest-resolution usage data in real time so that invoices reflect contract changes as they happen rather than being corrected after the fact.
The approach was deliberately strategic rather than short-term: a platform NHS Digital and the wider health and care sector could control, adapt and build upon for years, delivered openly with the client involved in every part of the process and holding full say over the final product. A minimum viable product was delivered within six months and, despite the disruption of the pandemic, the system went live in summer 2020.
The reviewers said
I believe this innovation demonstrates finance transformation through the adoption of open-source technology, enabling the automation of adjustments to reduce processing time, improve billing accuracy and quality whilst delivering cost significant improvement.
One NHS Finance peer reviewer
I think this is an exciting approach to innovation. Open source software can offer a cost effective approach to development.
One NHS Finance peer reviewer
The outcome
The automation allowed 5-10 staff to be redeployed to other key areas of NHS Digital, and created the path to real-time customer and supplier self-service - removing the aggregation burden entirely, speeding up the process and increasing accuracy.
The platform has since progressed through further phases of iterative development and is on course to process over £100m per year. NHS Digital has full autonomy over the system, which can be improved continuously throughout its lifespan and implemented more widely across the health and care sector.
This project was peer reviewed and published by the One NHS Finance Innovation Forum as Innovation E4 (Time-Period Billing and Rewindable Transactions Engine). The Forum publishes its innovations so that others can learn from them; the Forum's record of it requires a login.