Enhanced referral system and improved reporting cited as key goals for cancer charity
Sword Ciboodle (www.sword-ciboodle.com), provider of customer-oriented business software and services, today revealed that it has been selected by Marie Curie Cancer Care to help support the charity’s objective of increasing and improving the level of service it provides to patients and their families.
Employing more than 2,700 nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals, Marie Curie Cancer Care is one of the UK’s largest charities and provides care to around 29,000 terminally ill patients in the community and in its hospices, along with support for their families. The organisation has a strategic goal to double its level of patient care over the next three years, and chose Sword Ciboodle as the platform that will help support that growth.
“We knew that we needed to explore how new technology can help us improve our processes to increase the number of patients we can support and to generally improve our services,” said Keith Floodgate, Assistant Director Business Development, Marie Curie Cancer Care. “Sword Ciboodle has demonstrated to us that it is aligned with our goal of putting patients and families first, and we are looking forward to seeing the results of this project, which will help support the direction of this charity for many years to come.”
The largest component of Marie Curie’s work is the provision of in-home care for patients that wish to spend their last days at home, rather than in a hospital. The scheduling of nurses’ activities is currently a challenging exercise, with the requirements of patients and their families fluctuating depending on many factors such as availability, stage of illness and so on. In addition, Marie Curie Nurses is introducing new options that extend the service to include rapid response and shorter day and night visits, which adds further complexity to the scheduling exercise.
In Marie Curie’s referral centre, the organisation currently uses a nurse matching system that needs to be upgraded as it can take as long as 20 minutes to assign a nurse to a patient’s home. The charity is looking to Sword Ciboodle to improve the level of service that it offers to those calling the referral centre by shortening the time required to complete a referral, and to improve integration with its financial system for accurate billing and salary payment. In addition, Sword Ciboodle’s out of the box case-handling feature will help Marie Curie to manage its relationships with Primary Care Organisations throughout the UK.
Improved reporting capability is also a key feature of the project. Marie Curie management is keen to be able to determine what ability the organisation has to provide its service at any given time, and Sword Ciboodle will provide access to the real-time data needed to be able to support this. In addition, accurate reporting is an important element for Marie Curie to be able to demonstrate its performance against key metrics to those organisations that provide funds for care provision.
“We needed a solution that would be a strategic part of our organisation and give us a dynamic and flexible platform that we can build on as we go forward,” added Floodgate. “With its process-based approach to building software, Sword Ciboodle will provide us with a solution that can grow and adapt to our changing environment, ensuring that our organisational objectives can be supported by our technology over the long term.”
Sword Ciboodle’s strength in delivering web-enabled customer service applications will also be a key factor, as Marie Curie seeks to make its services as widely accessible as possible.
“All of us at Sword Ciboodle are delighted to be working with Marie Curie Cancer Care as both a customer and one of our chosen charities,” said Kenny Bain, CEO, Sword Ciboodle EMEA. “The support that Marie Curie Cancer Care provides to terminally ill patients and their families is truly inspirational and we are honoured to be working with them.”
The first phase of the project, which will see the replacement of the existing referral system, as well as the delivery of reporting and case handling features, is expected to go live in spring/summer 2010.
About Sword Ciboodle
Sword Ciboodle helps improve the way large organisations interact with their customers. The combination of award-winning, process-managed CRM software and specialist consulting and delivery services help Sword Ciboodle’s clients achieve higher revenues from their customers and reduce operational costs. Sword Ciboodle is consistently recognised by industry analysts as one of the world’s leading customer-centric technology providers. For more information, please visit www.sword-ciboodle.com.
