Insource has appointed Jason Harries as chief commercial officer as the NHS data management specialist repositions its business around operational pressures.
Harries joins the executive team and board with more than 25 years of experience in healthcare informatics, analytics and consultancy.
He was previously a partner at EY, managing director of Telstra Health UK, which includes Dr Foster, and chief executive of both CHKS and Capita Healthcare Analytics.
The appointment comes as Insource repositions its business around areas including elective and cancer recovery, income assurance during electronic patient record changes, statutory reporting and capacity planning.
Its Unified Data Layer is in production across more than 22 NHS trusts and health boards and provides the foundation for those applications.
Tim Eltze, chief executive of Insource, said: “Bringing Jason onto the executive team and the board is a deliberate decision about how we grow.
“The quality of our work has never been the problem. The gap has been between what we do and how we describe it. Say data platform to a board and they hear cost.
“Say cancer waits, income risk and assurance, and they hear their own priorities. Closing that gap is how we get to help more trusts, and more patients.”
Harries said: “NHS teams are making decisions every day on numbers they cannot fully stand behind.
“Insource has spent 27 years getting that foundation right. But shorter waits, cleaner cancer pathways and protected income are not ends in themselves.
“They are how better outcomes reach patients, and that is the single most important objective we have.”
Insource says the main challenge in NHS data management has shifted from moving information out of source systems into warehouses to improving data quality and resolving inconsistencies between figures.
The company says the same number can be derived separately within patient administration or electronic patient record systems, business intelligence platforms and national statutory submissions.
Different rules, corrections and reporting cycles can result in figures that do not match, leaving NHS teams to spend time reconciling data rather than acting on it.
Insource says storing data in a warehouse does not resolve discrepancies created earlier because the platform receives whatever information each source and extract sends it.
Its approach is to derive information once using a consistent set of rules, with full lineage back to the source event.
The company says its Unified Data Layer applies validation, business rules, reference mapping, grouping and data-quality checks during every load cycle.
This produces a single patient-level dataset that operational lists, board reports and national returns all read from.
Insource says data-quality problems can then be identified where they are created rather than months later during reconciliation, while the resulting data layer remains held and owned by the healthcare organisation.
