Background
The NHS’ (National Health Service) employs 1.4 million people in the UK, where 53.1% of their workforce is professionally qualified clinical staff. Many of them are employed by the hour and change work location more frequently than permanent hospital staff.
In the UK, it takes an average of 12 days to collect, scan, and verify the 20-35 documents (personal, medical, training) necessary to clear medical and non-medical staff.
During the pandemic, the workload and demand for trained staff reached critical levels, and the situation demanded innovation to achieve efficiencies, while maintaining the highest levels of security and control expected by the healthcare system.
Apart from being a time-consuming and tedious process for the staff to call the certifying parties for verification of the documents, hospitals and trusts stood to lose between GBP 2,000 and 5,000 of lost revenue per day of waiting. For employment agencies, the average revenue loss was GBP 2,000. Onboarding and verification times needed to be drastically reduced, for all stakeholders.
The project was a funded by Innovate UK, the UK’s national innovation agency. (https://www.ukri.org/councils/innovate-uk/ ).
Developing a platform for staff, hospitals and agencies
To ensure fast and non-fungible certification of test and health status, training documentation etc., a Digital Certificate Sharing Platform for the ecosystem of NHS staff, hospitals and agencies was developed based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT, also known as Blockchain).
Candidates/Staff & Placement Agencies upload and digitize their own documents in a fraud-resistant DLT platform (agencies provide validation), in a write-once-share-many type of application. Only the publisher of a document can see their own data until they grant access to a 3rd party, such as an agency, hospital or government representative.
Project results
Using the platform, the cost was cut 50% to 75% of on-boarding time for candidates using the platform and 100% of the cost of “re-scanning”.
The platform is still in use (2022) by NHS staffing agencies.
Key deliverables
- DLT based data storage and verification platform to ensure the documentation is non-fungible and individual data integrity is maintained at all times.
- API architecture to allow for integration with further 3rd party services and scalability.
- Built to allow for incorporation in different processes across multiple organisations.
- Headless architecture (Back-End can be directly integrated with clients already existing Front-End services, e.g. mobile apps).
- Front-End products for clients wanting a “turn-key” product.