16 February 2025 by Tippy Jackson
The last few years have fundamentally reshaped the financial pressures facing NHS trusts. From the global aftershocks of COVID-19 to the surge in inflation following the war in Ukraine, healthcare providers have faced increasingly complex questions:
Why are we over budget?
What’s changed?
What’s driving our costs?
At AdviseInc, we work with finance and procurement teams to help them #MakeSense of their healthcare spend – turning data into insights, and insights into action. And over the last 18 months, we’ve seen a shift in how teams think about financial planning. The old tools no longer cut it. Price alone doesn’t tell the full story.
That’s why we developed the Platform+ Spend Movement report.
In the early days of post-pandemic inflation, many NHS finance teams were looking for answers to the question of ‘why’. Prices were rising at a pace, and traditional budget models weren’t holding up. We responded by developing the Price Change report in Platform that gave trusts a clearer view of year-on-year unit price shifts: what you were paying for a product 12 months ago vs. now, and what that meant for your bottom line.
This allowed teams to see the true cost pressure of inflation, broken down by supplier, eClass, cost centre, and product. It was a step forward. But it wasn’t the full picture.
As Finance Directors began setting budgets for 2025, the questions got sharper. Yes, prices were up – but so was usage. New products were entering theatres. Teams were overspending despite procurement holding prices flat. The reality? Price change was only part of the picture.
Working in partnership with NHS finance leaders, we expanded our approach – resulting in a more powerful, more complete view of how spend shifts in real time.
The Spend Movement report brings a level of clarity to one of the NHS’s most pressing financial challenges: understanding what’s driving unexpected budget pressures.
It breaks down spend changes into three key drivers:
Price changes – are you paying more or less for the same product?
Volume changes – are you ordering more or fewer units than before?
New products – are you buying products this year that you weren’t last year?
By showing the £ impact of each of these movements, colour-coded red, amber, or green, the report makes it easy to spot where spend is rising – and understand why. The report allows you to drill down by cost centre, supplier, or product line.
This isn’t just useful – it’s transformative. It allows teams to distinguish between what procurement can control (price) and what’s driven by broader clinical or operational factors (volume and new product adoption).
And it’s helping NHS teams to forecast better, budget more realistically, and engage in more productive cross-team conversations.
One trust in the Midlands had seen an unexpected spike in spend within its theatres’ cost centre. The budget had been blown – but initial analysis didn’t show significant changes in unit price.
When we applied the Spend Movement report, the story became clear.
The trust had recently rolled out a new robotic surgical system as part of a capital investment project. But what hadn’t been accounted for in revenue budgets was the ongoing cost of consumables – exclusive to the manufacturer.
The volume of these consumables had surged. New product lines had been introduced. Combined, these two factors had driven over £1 million in additional spend in a single year – none of which would have been visible through a price-focused lens alone.
What makes Spend Movement powerful isn’t just the numbers – it’s the conversations it enables.
When procurement teams, finance leads, and clinicians see the same data, decision-making becomes faster, more transparent, and more strategic. You can ask better questions. Focus on what you can influence. And stop chasing symptoms of budget pressure when you can target the cause.
We’ve seen this shift time and again: hospitals working more collaboratively because the data provides a common language. One finance director summed it up:
“Before this, finance and procurement were often looking at the numbers in isolation. The Spend Movement report brought us together with a shared view—suddenly we were talking about product mix and usage patterns, not just unit prices. It gave us the insight we needed to plan smarter.”
The NHS is entering another challenging year. Despite planned funding uplifts, pressures continue to mount – from workforce agreements and rising demand, to increased costs in care delivery. Budgets will be stretched further, and the pressure to deliver savings will intensify.
To meet those challenges, trusts need better tools – tools that don’t just show what was spent, but explain why. That’s what Spend Movement was built for.
We believe the most powerful solutions are co-designed. That’s why we built this in collaboration with NHS leaders, and why we continue to refine it with every trust we support.
We love solving complex problems, and we know healthcare spend is rarely simple. But with the right data and the right people in the room, we can help to #MakeSense of it.
At AdviseInc, we help teams move beyond spreadsheets to uncover the stories in their data – so they can plan better, spend smarter, and work more effectively together.
If you haven’t yet explored what Spend Movement could mean for your trust, now’s the time to start. We look forward to working with you.
Get in touch at insights@adviseinc.co.uk
