Microsoft revealed that British healthcare support services provider KFM has been using its technology for the last few months and has made sure that healthcare staff gets their supplies and equipment right.

As a result, the technology giant said that clinicians at one of the largest and busiest hospitals in London are getting to allocate more time to patients.

KFM is a fully-owned subsidiary of King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which is one of the major trauma centres in London. With more than 1,447 beds at five sites in south east London, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust treats more than 1.3 million patients annually, while carrying out nearly 1,250 operations per week in 45 operating theatres.

KFM’s role is to help the NHS trust to run its support services, which includes the procurement and delivery of important medical supplies and equipment.

The healthcare support services provider’s staff has been using Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations running on Azure. The technology is said to be helping KFM in ordering, tracking, and tracing, and also for paying for medical supplies and equipment at all sites of the NHS trust.

Previously, all such activities were undertaken by clinicians using various systems, said Microsoft. The process was time-consuming and inefficient besides forcing clinicians to spend up some of their time from patient care, said the technology giant.

KFM chief executive Andrew Lockwood said: “King’s is one of the capital’s busiest acute Trusts, so a critical part of ensuring high quality patient care is to ensure that systems and processes are as productive and efficient as possible.

“By using Dynamics 365, KFM has released clinicians from routine ordering, checking storerooms and dealing with suppliers so that they can spend as much time as possible with their patients. The team and I are very proud that we are able to play a role in improving the patient experience by leveraging new technology.”

Following the deployment of Dynamics 365 in October 2019, Microsoft claimed that the time for receipt goods received from suppliers has come down by 70% and ordering times have been reduced by 25%. Furthermore, financial processes have been optimised, accounting accuracy has become better, and waste has been cut down, said the company.

KFM has also got rid of various manual and paper-based processes, courtesy of the use of technology, thereby saving time for the staff and further bringing down costs.