South Tyneside NHS
Foundation Trustis usingbusiness intelligence softwareto cut
costs, reduce hospital waiting lists, and combat its data
duplication problems.
The trust has a turnover of £90m and 600 beds in multiple sites,
but having a good business intelligence system means it employs
only two data analysts and a data quality analyst.
The trust was faced with the government's reforms and plans to
modernise the NHS through the implementation of the
NHS National Programme for IT. At the heart of this strategy is
the introduction of a national
Care Records Service, based on an electronic patient record
system that will span five geographic clusters across England.
Vast amounts of clinical and non-clinical patient data will be
available to thousands of healthcare professionals throughout the
patient care process, and these individuals will also update and
create more data as they go. So, information governance and quality
has become a major issue for NHS provider organisations.
The two core challenges for NHS trusts such as South Tyneside,
are that the government wants all NHS patients to have a choice of
hospital, so data must be available to healthcare professionals in
multiple locations. Secondly, the government is introducing a
'payment by results' system where NHS trust income is directly
linked to the quantity of services provided. This has forced NHS
trusts to re-examine how services are managed, ensuring services
are high-quality and cost-effective.
South Tyneside NHS Trust saw business intelligence as the
solution to its problem, and invested heavily in 2001 to ensure
that it could meet the challenges of organising data correctly,
mining it effectively, and meeting performance and clinical
governance requirements.
Its business intelligence system is based on Microsoft Windows
NT Server, Oracle 10g databases, Silverlink Software, and a range
of
Cognos business intelligence tools. These tools allow the trust
to manage, access, analyse, interrogate and report on information
across the organisation.
South Tyneside NHS Trust implemented the Cognos business
intelligence systems across all its major areas, including waiting
list management, accident and emergency, radiology and
pharmacy.
The IT system draws information from three main relational
databases to model and build data sets with more than 50 million
consolidated rows of data and up to 500,000 categories.
The IS department works closely with the trust's management team
to develop specific data sets, containing specialised information
for various departments across the hospital.
These are made available to other managers, either from their
desktops or via the web, allowing them to view and analyse
information specific to their area of the trust, says Martin
Alexander, head of information systems at South Tyneside NHS
Foundation Trust.
Alexander says the business intelligence system has allowed the
trust to manage its business information better than ever before,
and turn that data into knowledge. This is because a typical
patient will intersect with many hospital departments and consume
resources across the trust. So a complex set of data will be held
on that individual on between four and 10 core business systems,
from finance through to hotel services, operations, radiology and
pathology. "All of those system are usually from different
technology suppliers," says Alexander.
South Tyneside Trust chose to pool much of that disparate data
onto a central electronic patient clinical records system, from UK
supplier Silverlink Software, which resides on an
Oracle database and client server system. The single electronic
patient records system combined the A&E, maternity, and in and
out patients systems, among others. Besides this core database,
there are two additional core systems: pharmacy and pathology.
The trust then effectively uses Cognos as its datawarehouse and
middleware layer, offering its users a web interface to access
data, which is reported on using
Cognos
Impromptu and analysed using
Cognos Powerplay.
It uses Cognos to tap directly into the data, extracting the
data overnight into Cognos cubes, which are worked on during day,
says Alexander. "We tend to take a question, build a Cognos cube,
publish it and that question is never asked again. But we gradually
grow the cubes and incorporate the managers' requests into the
cube, answer the requests and republish the cube. It is a bit like
building a picture, except you are building a large and complex
cube instead.
"We have found Cognos easy for users to pick up and use with
very little training. After a two-hour course, they are playing
with it, slicing and dicing and moving data around. A lot of our
users are internet-savvy, and the system also creates an
internet/intranet news digest that gives you a view of your
information data set. Managers can drill through the data sent to
them and ask questions electronically. This has cut down the number
of questions we are sent."
The ways in which South Tyneside has measured the success of its
business intelligence system are through indicators such as low
waiting lists, managing hospital processes more quickly, and having
high data quality. "This means making sure you have got the name
and address right, and are not asking the same question more than
once. Data quality is at the centre of that," says Alexander.