New Case Study Video: Somerset NHS Foundation Trust processes 100,000 invoices per annum through inSTREAM
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Somerset NHS Foundation Trust is a large, integrated public-sector healthcare provider within the NHS in England. Being part of the NHS, the aim of the trust is (unsurprisingly) the planning, delivery, and management of publicly funded health services for the population of Somerset and parts of neighbouring counties.
The Trust prides itself on being one of the most integrated NHS providers in England, bringing together acute hospital care, community health services, mental health, learning disability services, and part of primary care into a single organisation.
It serves some some 580,000 people across Somerset, parts of Dorset, North Somerset and North Devon, and employs some 13,000 people.
Back in Oct 2020, the Trust selected inSTREAM from the Integra as their new Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) system.
Kate Tilley, Head of Transaction Services takes up the story.
“We’ve used inSTREAM since 2020 when our Trust merged with Taunton and Somerset NHS Trust. We selected inSTREAM as it was the best available solution and because it was being offered as an integrated module our Integra cloud-based finance and accounting system. On average, since we went live, we have been processing around 8000+ invoices a month.”
For the Somerset Trust, inSTREAM processes supplier invoices, meaning that the Trust will be ready for the HMRC ‘e-invoicing’ initiative that becomes mandatory in 2029.
Chris Upham, Assistant Director Financial Services continues. “For 3 or 4 years before inSTREAM, we used a product called Cloud Trade but in 2024 we moved to inSTREAM as our ‘go-forward’ solution. We looked at other alternatives, including Abbyy but inSTREAM already addressed the requirements of the NHS and worked well with Integra Finance, so it was the most suitable alternative for us.”
The Somerset NHS Foundation Trust was created as a result of the merger of Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust and Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust in 2020. And folding in Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in 2023.
The NHS has been actively encouraging mergers of NHS Trusts where they believed consolidation would improve sustainability, quality, or system integration. There were approximately 30 mergers involving primary care trust provider services between 2009 and 2012 alone, plus dozens more involving acute and foundation trusts throughout the decade.
Regarding inSTREAM we asked for further details about how inSTREAM uses artificial intelligence (AI). Katy explained, “inSTREAM uses AI machine learning whereas previous software didn’t. For governance and to ensure the accuracy of the data, inSTREAM offers an initial managed service during implementation called ‘Human in the Loop’. Initially most of our invoices were reviewed by the ‘Human in the Loop’ service to ensure that the AI was correctly extracting the data from the invoices. Sometimes, even with live running, invoices can be flagged for human checking if the system feels that there could be a potential error, so reducing the risk of automation errors. Regarding service and support, inSTREAM was open to discussions about our requirements and helped us improve our processes and reduce errors. Now we are up and running we also have access to invoice processing information on our portal., so we can look at our stats at any time.”
Chris added “We wanted a touchless seamless transition, whether that is from an invoice arriving in our inbox, be it a PDF or an XML, the aim is for it to automatically go through into our Integra accounts system. If there is a purchase order, the invoice will go through to payment. This saves much time in the finance function. There is now no need for a transaction assistant to be manually reviewing invoices.”
Fraud is a major threat for all commercial and public enterprises today. We asked Katy Tilley about how inSTREAM helps Somerset NHS combat this? Katy said, “inSTREAM checks the bank details on all invoices against the bank details that we hold on our system. It will also flag up and remove any duplicates that we receive. We are aiming to make sure as many of our accounts payable transactions are as touchless as possible so are putting as many supplies as we can through inSTREAM to get rid of the manual input of the invoices, and inSTREAM gives us peace of mind in terms of it being another measure we have in place to help us prevent fraud.”
Somerset is just one of the many NHS Trusts, councils and other public bodies who benefit from inSTREAM, together with many private sector companies around the globe.
To watch the full interview with Chris Upham, Assistant Director Financial Services and Katy Tilly, Head of Transaction Services from Somerset NHS Foundation Trust
If you would like to learn more – please contact Olivia O’Connor – Olivia.oconnor@advt-group.com.
