Smarter spending in the NHS: Streamlining continuing healthcare
The NHS is under constant pressure to do more with less, but this pressure is keenly felt in departments that siat the intersection of multiple services, such as Continuing Healthcare (CHC)Coordinating care across hospitals, community services, local authorities, and private providers is resource-intensive, and even small inefficiencies can ripple into significant delays, costs, and staff frustration. The process has historically relied on paper-based workflows, leading to administrative inefficiencies for some time, and many professionals who use it daily agree that the time is long overdue for a digital overhaul.
The NHS 10 Year Plan has now been published, and we can see the Government aims to ‘restore financial discipline’ and ‘break the short-term cycle of financial planning’ embedded in the system, all through digitalisation. This emphasises the urgency to propel the CHC process forwards and use digital solutions to create better financial workflows that result in cost savings.
CHC teams operate in one of the NHS’s most complex environments, overseeing every stage of continuing healthcare. Their responsibilities include managing assessments, funding decisions, care packages, and reviews for patients who often require ongoing, high-cost care – many of whom sit between NHS and social care responsibilities. The process typically involves referrals from hospital or community teams, followed by coordination with GPs, social workers, and specialist clinicians. It also requires gathering evidence from multiple systems and settings, presenting cases to panels for funding decisions, and finally commissioning and monitoring care packages to ensure patients receive the support they need.
Without streamlined systems and aligned processes, staff spend hours chasing paperwork, repeating data entry, or reconciling mismatched records, all of which delay care and increase stress for patients, their families and professionals alike.
And when we look at the bigger picture facing ICBs, we can see the significant scale of cost that inefficiencies in the administration process of CHC creates, particularly when we look at AACC (All-age-continuing care) as a whole. £5.5 billion is spent annually on this type of care in the UK, supporting around 160,000 patients. However, a notable concern is that up to 15% of this funding, approximately £825 million each year, is not used for direct patient care. It is instead consumed by administrative tasks and paperwork.
Manual workflows are another area that not only consumes time, but also results in significant financial waste. Teams incur administrative expenses ranging from £30 to £50 per hour, with inefficient processes such as duplicated data entry and disjointed record-keeping contributing to hundreds of thousands of pounds in avoidable spending.
Here lies the perfect opportunity to improve efficiency and redirect funds towards frontline services.
This isn’t just about cutting costs. Smarter spending is about investing wisely. Too often, CHC teams are forced to work across disconnected systems: NHS EPRs, local authority records, commissioning tools, and provider systems. These silos create delays and duplication.
These are admin-heavy tasks, and low-cost automation tools or digital workflow platforms can remove much of this manual effort. Digital platforms exist that offer modern, end-to-end solutions that not only enhance patient care but are also able to deliver substantial cost savings. These tools can automate reminders, pull data from existing sources, and generate templated reports that allows teams to focus on clinical judgment.
Smart investment in an end-to-end single digital platform would allow staff to: view patient information in one centralised place, reduce the time spent manually locating records, and ensure decisions are based on up-to-date, complete information.
Investing in such a platform streamlines and consolidates each stage of the process, automating much of the administrative workload and enabling staff to focus more on their professional expertise rather than paperwork. This leads to faster assessments, clearer funding decisions, and better coordination across services.
The patient is always at the heart of CHC, but the often-outdated processes cause delays and frustration. By digitising and simplifying the process, ICBs will align their technology with NHS priorities. Ambitious ICBs have already begun to take these steps.
Care packages commissioned through CHC often rely on external providers. However, different frameworks, pricing structures, and terms across regions or commissioning groups introduce unnecessary complexity.
