In our Interview Series this week, we spoke with Dr Anas Nader, co-founder and CEO of Patchwork, a solution that transforms temporary staffing by connecting vacant shifts with a growing marketplace of healthcare workers, proven to save the NHS millions. HTN asked Anas a few questions to find out more about the company and its plans for the next year.
Could you tell me a bit about yourself and your organisation?
Myself and my co-founder, Dr Jing Ouyang, are doctors who teamed up to create Patchwork; a digital solution that connects NHS organisations to a growing number of healthcare workers, reducing the reliance on locum agencies and improving the experience of flexible working in the NHS.
In 2016 I joined Chelsea & Westminster Hospital Trust and my job was to look at how the Trust could make their staffing more effective and reduce empty shifts. Filling empty shifts is a massive yet under-reported issue within the NHS that costs them billions. At the end of 2018 NHS Trusts were forecasting spending £5.6 billion on temporary staff by the end of the financial year.
Despite this spend, research from the Nuffield Trust found that over half of consultants and two thirds of junior doctors said there were ‘frequently’ or ‘often’ gaps in hospital medical cover that raised significant patient safety issues. What we have is a vicious cycle where staffing issues are draining the NHS of resources, which in turn impacts staff and compromises patient care.
I worked with Chelsea & Westminster’s Temporary Staffing Office to improve recruitment to their ‘staff bank’; the hospital’s own temporary staffing pool which is much more cost-effective than agencies. Increasing the staff bank resulted in a dramatic reduction in shifts going to locum agencies and saved the Trust £30,000 a month.
This big saving got me thinking – could I somehow use technology to help scale this impact NHS-wide? I joined up with Jing (we were both part of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs programme’s first intake) and together we developed Patchwork to revolutionise the way NHS temporary staffing is managed.
We’re helping NHS organisations achieve three key objectives – save money, free up time and improve patient safety.
Firstly, we help them save money and gain financial control by connecting staff banks directly to healthcare workers, reducing reliance on expensive recruitment agencies. Secondly, we free-up time and remove stress for organisations by automating complex and repetitive tasks. And thirdly, we improve patient safety by increasing bank fill rates, to make sure we have safe staffing levels with compliant workers.
We do this all through Patchwork’s mobile app for bank workers, and a cloud-based software for hospital managers. We make sure the solution is entirely tailored and flexible to each Trust’s unique challenges, and it is implemented by our team of specialist temporary staffing advisors.
What is the most significant achievement for your organisation in the past 12 months and what will be over the next 12 months?
What’s been fantastic is seeing the massive impact Patchwork is already having within NHS Trusts. Since introducing the software to Chelsea & Westminster, the Trust saw a 500% increase in the size of their staff bank and were able to fill 90% of vacant shifts with their own staff. This saving in agency spend and through increased efficiency meant the Trust saved £1.2 million in one year with Patchwork.
Our software is currently used across 10 NHS Trusts, with over 22 clinical sites and over 8,000 doctors benefitting from the platform. Every month, Patchwork matches over 7,500 shifts on its platform – shifts which employers would otherwise have been scrabbling to fill with agency staff.
We’re proud to have a range of high-profile investors behind us and to date have raised £2 million in funding. Our investors include Harvard Business School Alumni Angles (HBSAA) and the British Medical Journal, the world-leading medical journal investing via its BMJ New Ventures Initiative. The BMJ chose to invest in Patchwork, stating: ‘Patchwork is an innovative digital solution which will make a great contribution to the future of the healthcare service through improved patient care and increased efficiencies for the NHS’ and because ‘Patchwork stood out with their comprehensive approach to this complex challenge.’
After a hugely competitive pitch, we’ve also recently been appointed as a Crown Commercial Services supplier for Flexible Resource Pool (RM6158), focusing on the provision of Staff Bank services to NHS Contracting Authorities. We were also re-appointed on the Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 framework for the 2nd consecutive year.
And on a personal level, it was fantastic to be named along with Jing as one of Business Cloud’s 35 Tech Entrepreneurs Under 35, in May, and win a HSJ award for our platform.
Our focus now is on growing our reach, delivering interoperability for our NHS partners, and ensuring we support each of partners with the bespoke staffing challenges they are facing.
What problems and challenges are there to overcome?
Innovating in healthcare is always a challenge. Of course, Trusts need to be careful that new technology actually makes a difference and doctors don’t want their precious time wasted. That’s why having people with first-hand experience of the problem, such as frontline doctors and NHS managers, lead healthtech innovation is vital.
That doesn’t mean encouraging innovative clinicians to leave the NHS! Instead, Trusts need to start creating an environment for innovators to flourish within the NHS and contribute directly to their evolution.
It all starts with a changing culture. The NHS needs to create a structure in the system that rewards risk-taking innovation, and where an innovator is encouraged rather than discouraged to think differently. We can’t just create funding or an innovation programme – it’s fundamentally all about a culture of excellence, and a culture that helps people to come with answers (not just complaints), so they can solve these problems in a collaborative partnership. This is harder for the NHS to do than sourcing funding alone.
What do you think is the biggest technology challenge?
Technology is having a bit of an image crisis at the minute, and there’s a fair amount of distrust due to data rights and usage. We also need to ensure that we embrace technology which will really bring us benefits, not just for the sake of it. After the first wave of excitement over all the possibilities of technology, I think we’re now seeing a wave of cynicism; a bit of a backlash. Though it’s crucial to be critical and interrogate any proposed change, it’s still true that technology has massive potential to do good in every sector and vastly improve the quality of lives.
The results coming from Patchwork’s adoption in Trusts proves the need our software is meeting and highlights how thoroughly researched, well developed technology that is empathetic to the user can have a tremendous impact and transform services for the better.
What advice would you give to other organisations or professionals?
Build a great team around you. True innovation isn’t about egos and it’s about learning from those in your team as well as others doing exciting things in the space you’re working in. At Patchwork we’ve built – and are growing! – a dynamic, ambitious team which pools knowledge and skills to help us work towards our healthcare vision.
What is next in your space?
A lot of attention in health tech, and in tech more widely, has been focused on the consumer side of things, such as improving health access for patients. Of course, it’s important we continue to innovate in this area, but there’s a growing understanding that there’s masses technology can do to improve the internal processes within organisations . Just because big companies and organisations have been doing things in a certain way for years doesn’t mean these processes are beyond reproach and can’t benefit from new ways of thinking. I think moving forward we’re going to see a lot more health tech dedicated to making internal systems more efficient, which in turn helps patients.
What are you working on at the moment?
We’re currently working on refining and expanding the capabilities of our software, as well as introducing Patchwork to more hospital Trusts, to help save them millions too. In the UK over £3 billion is spent by the NHS every year on agency doctors and nurses (locums) to fill short and long-term vacancies, so there’s a massive opportunity to help Trusts right across the country.
