Patient Choice | Healthcare IT Support

Scaling Patient Choice From 30 to 150 Orders a Day

Patient Choice supports more than 100,000 patients across the UK, having added between 25,000 and 30,000 in the past year alone. Orders reach them through a clinical referral chain:

• The referral: A nurse identifies that a patient needs a particular product and refers them to
• The repeat: From there, the relationship is direct, with customers returning to Patient Choice much as they would to a pharmacy

It's a model that rewards responsiveness, and one where growth quickly runs into the limits of how much a team can physically process in a day.

Contents

1. The Challenge
2. Our Solution
3. The Net9 Framework
4. The Result

The Challenge

Adding 25,000 to 30,000 patients in a single year is a good problem to have. It is still a problem.

At 25 to 30 orders per day, Patient Choice's processing capacity was tied directly to the number of people available to do the work. Every increase in demand pointed towards the same answer: hire again. For a business growing this quickly, that's an expensive way to scale and a slow one.

The constraint wasn't effort. It was friction. Staff were moving between separate ERP and CRM systems to complete a single order, and every one of those clicks was time not spent on the next patient.

Meanwhile, Patient Choice's internal IT team had shifted away from day-to-day support and towards systems administration, building the tools the organisation needed to keep moving. That shift only works if someone else is holding the infrastructure steady underneath it, and if compliance, in a sector where it's audited rather than assumed, is never in question.

Our Solution

Netitude took ownership of the layer Patient Choice shouldn't have to think about, so their own team could put its attention somewhere more valuable. That means:

• A fast-responding service desk: issues resolved quickly, so a technical problem never becomes an operational one
• Cyber Essentials Plus and NHS Mail: ongoing management of the compliance obligations healthcare organisations are measured against
• Constant alignment on security: not a once-a-year review, but a continuing conversation as the organisation changes

With that foundation dependable, Patient Choice's internal team built Staff Tools, a web application developed in house that sits over their existing ERP and CRM systems and presents staff with a single front end.

The idea is deceptively simple. Instead of navigating between applications to process one order, staff work in one place. The clicks disappear, and with them the ceiling on how many orders a person can handle in a day.

Patient Choice built that themselves. Our contribution was making sure they never had to stop and fix something else first.

The Net9 Framework

Our work with every client runs through Net9, our framework for giving a business full visibility across nine key delivery areas:

1. Business continuity protection
2. Cloud platforms
3. Scalable technology estate
4. Licensing and legal
5. Network infrastructure and wireless
6. Connectivity and collaboration
7. Threats and vulnerabilities
8. Power, environment and ESG
9. Standardised, efficient, scalable systems

Rather than fixing problems one at a time, Net9 lets us see the whole picture and build a roadmap that continues to work as the business grows. Read more about the Net9 process.

The Result

Patient Choice now processes 150 orders a day, up from 25-30, and no longer needs to hire as the business grows.

That last part is the one worth sitting with. Growth had been linear and expensive: more patients meant more people. Breaking the link between the two changed what the organisation could take on, and it arrived at 30, and no longer needs to hire, as in the same year Patient Choice hit and exceeded its targets and returned its first profit.

The clinical side matters just as much. Patient Choice's approach to catching incorrect prescriptions before they're fulfilled has saved the NHS an estimated £1 million. Accuracy at volume is exactly what breaks first when a team is stretched.

Compliance has held throughout. Cyber Essentials Plus and NHS Mail obligations are managed continuously rather than revisited under pressure, and security alignment has kept pace with the organisation's growth.