Capability: Analytic Applications

Reshaping health and social care with data insight

Posted on: 14 July 2022
Reshaping health and social care with data insight

How data can help you improve patient outcomes in 7 priority areas

There’s constant pressure on NHS organisations to deliver better patient outcomes and value from public funding. Demand is high and service quality is under intense scrutiny.

NHS organisations have access to a wealth of organisational and patient data. But bringing it together to produce meaningful and trusted insight is a challenge. Decision-makers and clinicians must have access to analytics and reporting in clear formats. Data insight needs to be current and available in a timely manner. Data storage and usage must also be secure and compliant, to meet NHS and national standards for patient and citizen confidentiality.

Everyone’s talking about the fact that data insight is crucial to help your NHS organisation plan, operate and continually optimise resources, services, staffing and patient experiences. But what does that mean in practice? How do you unlock the insight to make a difference today? Amongst all the competing priorities for NHS managers, how specifically can data insight change the way your organisation operates, improve patient outcomes and tackle challenges like waiting lists and staff shortages?

Working with NHS Trusts and social care organisations, we’ve seen at first hand the difference that well managed data can make to efficiency and patient care. Actionable insight to influence real-time and future service design and planning is the holy grail for driving real value from your data to help improve the performance of your NHS organisation.

But to make it happen, where do you start? How can you achieve rapid and meaningful impact from an investment of time and budget in a data project?

We’ve identified seven high value activities that our NHS customers and partners have successfully optimised using data insight. By quantifying the benefits of one or more of these outcomes for your organisation, the case for prioritising your data project becomes clearer and easier to communicate with colleagues and stakeholders.

7 priority activities that NHS organisations can drive with data

1. Model and predict demand for services

Complete and accurate data and effective analytics tools give you the power to model and predict demand for services based on specific evidence relating to your patients and community. Produce relevant reports that decision-makers can scrutinise and understand with ease, so they can support your recommendations readily.

2. Put the right staff in the right place at the right time

Effective and accurate data about demand for services and availability of staff can help you roster more effectively – reducing wait times and giving patients better experiences in your clinical organisation. This has particular value when dealing with increased absence relating to Covid.

3. Review and respond immediately to current patient needs

If you have the capability to analyse patient data in real time, you can give clinicians the information they need to make fully informed decisions in the moment about care and treatment, to achieve the best patient outcomes.

4. Plan services effectively for better patient outcomes in critical areas

With a specialist NHS data platform like CACI’s InView, you can apply powerful analytics to dive deep into data and answer the most important questions for your organisation. Drive improved patient outcomes by tackling priority KPIs for your organisation – from waiting list monitoring, patient level costing and clinic usage to theatre utilisation and clinician availability.

5. Focus on frequent flyers

With a clear picture of frequent flyer characteristics and visit patterns from comprehensive and up-to-date reporting, you can proactively identify patients who need more support or information and help them to access the most appropriate services and treatments for their needs.

6. Integrate data to build a complete picture of demand for services

When you bring together local government and hospital data in a single, integrated data platform, you can access even richer insight into patients, services and demand. With one source of analytics and reporting, you can maximise the value of the information your organisation holds, including collaborating with other Trusts through data sharing within an ICS ecosystem.

7. Understand your patients more thoroughly and personally

Compliant data records and effective reporting gives your NHS organisation a clear picture of the demographic backgrounds of your patients. By understanding their backgrounds and lifestyles, you can shape your services and communications for better access and improved outcomes.

Every NHS organisation is different, with priorities and challenges that are unique to its community and resources. No matter where you are on your data journey or how you most urgently need to uncover and apply insight to your decision-making and planning, a tailored data transformation strategy can help you move forward. The most practical and effective approach is to outline a series of steps on that journey, making sure that you drive value from your data project as early as possible by accessing insight that supports your most pressing tactical requirements.

If you’d like to find out more about how data helps you deliver tangible improvements in key areas of your NHS organisation’s patient care, download our brochure Spearheading your data journey to improve patient outcomes. It describes in more detail how you can take action to activate data insight to reshape health and social care. It explains how CACI’s Health Insight Success Cycle is specifically designed to drive maximum value from data for NHS organisations.

To find out more visit our website or speak to an NHS data consultant about the results we’ve helped other organisations achieve, please get in touch with our NHS client team.

Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust

Posted on: 21 June 2022
Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust

Highlights

• Bringing together a disparate reporting estate
• Move from traditional QlikView to active intelligence with Qlik Sense
• Rich visualisations inform clinical and operational decisions
• User-friendly apps and time-saving report automation
• Expert healthcare-specific support from CACI Qlik Sense consultant

About Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust

Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust is a local Trust providing compassionate, expert care for over half a million people every year, in their homes, in the community and across three hospital sites at Pontefract, Dewsbury and Pinderfields.

The challenge: A fresh start with reporting

Long-time CACI QlikView customer Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust was ready to harness the full power of digital business intelligence for insight to support a forward-looking, data hungry leadership team.

Two years’ focus on putting the foundations in place to provide the data capacity and capability meant the team was ready to address its reporting estate, which had been built in a piecemeal fashion throughout the preceding years.

Ian Vause, Head of Information, sums up the challenge: “We have a big reporting estate that uses a whole lot of technologies and sources – including SQL, Excel, and Word documents as well as Qlik View. The time had come to unpick all that and start afresh. We wanted to professionalise our information team and we needed a high-performing, BI tool with all the latest capabilities to support them.”

The solution: Flexible data and dashboards for quick access to information

The Trust’s information team had an excellent, long-standing relationship in place with CACI as the Qlik license provider. Regular account meetings had maintained confidence in CACI’s Qlik knowledge and expertise. Mid Yorkshire asked CACI to provide new licenses and work with the team to transition from QlikView to Qlik Sense.

Ian explains: “Our customers today are our operational management team, rather than clinicians, but that’s changing. We’re moving towards being focused on information for clinical decision-making, to create a healthier balance between service and operational managers and clinicians and clinical managers. We’re promoting self-service, so people can quickly and easily access the insight they need. The flexible data dashboards in Qlik Sense are vital for this.”

To enable a smooth transition, Mid Yorkshire is using dual licenses, while building up its reporting estate in Qlik Sense. Information Manager Luke Elmer says, “We’re up to 25 apps in Qlik Sense now – about a quarter of the way to our final state of migrating all our reports. We now have lots of people in the team who can design apps, load data, build and deploy the front end. We’re really starting to unlock the potential of what Qlik Sense can do.”

CACI is a trusted partner, offering second-line support, knowledge and guidance on Qlik as well as delivering an ongoing managed service for upgrades and maintenance. CACI’s Qlik for healthcare consultants have also delivered training and onboarding days for new starters.

The power of Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is a modern cloud analytics platform that helps organisations close the gaps between data, insights and action with real-time, Active Intelligence. It brings data and analytics together seamlessly in an end-to-end, real-time analytics data pipeline. Organisations can free their data from silos. Users can easily find relevant data, enrich it and create derivative data. Qlik Sense empowers more people in the organisation to discover and understand insights, from anywhere with world-class analytics.

The benefits: User-friendly visual insight for operational and clinical decisions

According to Luke Elmer, “Users say that the ability to refresh reports in a timelier manner is really helpful. Before, refreshing any report weekly or monthly was time-consuming, because it generally needed various logins and manual data transfers. Now we have them set up in Qlik Sense, people have near real-time insight without all the preparation – some apps refresh constantly and automatically.”

Ease and efficiency are key benefits. “The speed of Qlik Sense transactions is a big move forward,” Luke confirms. “Some of our data tables have a million plus rows – you can’t do much in Excel with that. We can now refresh reports quickly and cut and slice the data effectively – that means we can extract more relevant and granular insight.”

Qlik Sense offers the Information Team and its Trust customers rich data visualisation capability. Ian says, “We work in conjunction with or customers to build apps that work for them and that they, as non-technology people, can use. The visualisation is a key aspect of the functionality. Historically we only had the most basic line and bar chart visualisations. We can drill through the data easily in these visualisations – it’s very powerful. For example, we can show process flows using Sankey charts. People really like the tree maps and the geographic maps, where we plot postcodes to show where patients are coming from.”

Luke adds, “It’s also much simpler to train people to produce these visualisations in Qlik Sense than in Excel – it has some of this kind of functionality now but nowhere near as much.”

CACI has a strong standing in the NHS. We choose to continue working with CACI because of our good relationship over many years – there’s trust and understanding there. The consultants are available and responsive to questions at any time and go out of their way to provide extra information or demonstrations when we need them. We’re very happy with the relationship management, response and support.
Ian Vause, Head of Information, Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust

Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust

Posted on:
Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust

Highlights

• Specialist PLICS solution built for NHS Trusts
• Supports Critical Care Board operations
• Blended financial and patient insight for clinicians and managers
• User-friendly, intuitive dashboards for immediate visibility
• Expert, responsive training and valuable User Group support

 About CPFT

CPFT is an NHS health and social care organisation that provides services in inpatient, community and primary care settings. The Trust’s services support adult mental health, older people and adults, and children, young people and families. Its biggest bases are the Cavell Centre in Peterborough and Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge, but its 4,000 staff are based in more than 50 locations, supporting a population of nearly one million people

The challenge: Finding an intuitive PLICS solution to suit CPFT’s workstyle

With new PLICS regulations in force from 2020 for Mental Health, CPFT needed to update its systems to comply. The Trust was in the process of implementing a new e-patient record system, so requested a PLICS deadline extension to 2021, which was granted.

Michelle Barnes, CPFT’s Assistant Director of Finance, explains: “We knew that the regulation would soon be extended to its Community operations, so we decided to deploy a PLICS solution for both Mental Health and Community. We particularly wanted to find a system that felt intuitive to our team, so we could get the most value and efficiency from it.”

CPFT decided to replace its existing software outright, rather than upgrading it. The team selected CACI to integrate and implement our Synergy 4 patient level costing solution in a competitive process delivered through the NHS procurement framework.

The solution: Leading, specialist capability and supportive deployment

Michelle Barnes says, “We had demonstrations of four different systems. We particularly liked the logic of Synergy 4 – it matched how we approach things in our day-to-day work. For example, it uses familiar language and terms in allocations and apportionments. Other systems that we reviewed seemed either too basic or too convoluted.”

Finance Assistant Michelle Clarke adds, “We had been using Excel for a lot of our costings, which had its limitations. Some of the solutions we evaluated were still spreadsheet-based – we wanted to move away from this to a specialist system. We liked the way the outputs were presented and being able to customise the dashboards, so we could choose what we wanted to see.”

Once CPFT had selected the CACI solution, CACI’s trainers booked in working sessions to upload data and support the CPFT team to embed their financial model. CACI delivered training on the features and functions of the system, in context of CPFT’s particular approach, and provided a high-level reference guide.

Michelle Barnes says, “CACI made us feel confident that they were on our wavelength whenever we asked questions about the system.” Michelle Clarke agrees: “We worked with two different trainers, who were both really knowledgeable. They always understood what we needed – we felt the system was in our control from day one.”

The benefits: Secure PLICS reporting and accurate, relevant Trust-wise insight

Synergy 4 provides granular, detailed and accurate information that CPFT can use in an intuitive and collaborative way across the Trust. Michelle Clarke affirms: “Synergy 4 gives us a lot more flexibility with the dashboards – we can share the information with clinical managers and show them the fluctuations, in more detail. You can customise it for wards, teams and communities. Before we only had average contact and bed days – now we can have much more detail when we talk about what services cost.

“Before, we basically divided total costs by the number of patients to calculate patient-level costings. Now, we have so much more scope to be detailed and to layer financial information with demographics and population data. For example, we can apply postcodes and look at metrics like staff downtime and travel time for patients.”

Michelle Barnes adds, “When we move into Critical Care boards, we’ll have to split our contract into two, for north and south. The extra information we can extract from PLICS at GP practice level will really help us see how to split that contract.”

Peer advice and experience from the Synergy User Group

Both Michelle Clarke and Michelle Barnes agree that CACI’s Synergy User Group is an additional benefit that they’ve not experienced before. The User Group brings together NHS organisations from around the country in an online forum and for regular virtual meetings and clinics. This means the CPFT team can question other users with similar approaches and organisations and share their own best practice knowledge and tips. The User Group is led by CACI’s Synergy lead, who has a wealth of knowledge about how the solution works and how it can best deliver on Trusts’ priorities. Trusts can feed back to CACI about new functionality they’d like to see and upcoming requirements, so CACI can continue to evolve Synergy to anticipate and meet the latest needs.

Michelle Barnes says, “The User Group forum feels like it belongs to the Trusts – it’s not a sales update for CACI. It’s a chance to ask each other questions, as well as the CACI consultants. For example, peers might demo what they’re doing with reports – it’s a really good forum because it shows how people use the system in practice. It’s truly collaborative and interactive. Spin-off groups have emerged for different aspects, like the dashboards. And it’s so useful to be able to talk directly to other mental health and community trusts, because our needs can be different from acute trusts.”

It’s a strong relationship – we’ve had great support and interaction with everyone from the account manager to the trainers and helpdesk. We had a few IT issues, related to our firewall and making connections through it. CACI’s consultants were really responsive and came back to us very quickly to get this sorted. They were always progressing what they needed to and checking that things were satisfactorily resolved. The Synergy User Group is great – it helps us continue to explore and make the most of the solution, to deliver more decision insight and value for our Trust.”
Michelle Barnes, Assistant Director of Finance, CPFT

Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust

Posted on: 20 June 2022
Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust

Highlights

• One version of the truth instead of diverse standalone solutions
• Insight for decision-making, financial measurement and forecasting
• Local customisation to keep pace with change
• Fully maintained solution to reduce in-house IT burden
• Supports latest statutory reporting and ongoing change

About Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust

Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust provides acute health care services from Torbay Hospital, along with community health services and adult social care. It was the first Trust in England to integrate hospital and community care with social care.

The Trust has around 6,500 staff and 800 volunteers. It runs Torbay Hospital as well as five community hospitals and other local clinics. It provides health and social care to the local population, with around 500,000 face-to-face contacts in patients’ homes and communities each year, serving a resident population of approximately 286,000 people, plus about 100,000 holiday visitors at any one time in the summer season

I’d be happy to recommend this product to any other NHS Trust. InView gives us the flexibility to work around a stable core product — and the support from CACI is outstanding.
Stephen Judd, Informatics: Head of Data Engineering – Strategy and Improvement, Torbay and Devon NHS Foundation Trust

The challenge: Inadequate legacy systems and disparate, incomplete data

South Devon and Torbay has used InView for many years, with the original solution implemented in 2006. More recently, the Trust has experienced challenging times in its IT division, with tight budgets limiting staff and resources. This led to key systems becoming outdated, through lack of investment in upgrades and system replacements.

The resourceful IT team used workarounds and in-house development to bridge gaps and connect systems, to draw essential clinical and financial insight from the Trust’s data, stored in disparate sources.

Head of Data Engineering Stephen Judd says, “On top of this, since Covid, there have been big organisational changes in the Trust, including new wards, which affected the data we work with. And a lot of our lookup tables were based on old national standards. Although we had a made series of updates to the standards and data dictionary, our Patient Administration System (PAS) and InView hadn’t caught up.”

In 2020, Torbay and South Devon received funding to upgrade their SQL server and jumped at the chance. Stephen Judd says, “We knew we needed to upgrade the InView system as well and seized the opportunity to present a business case for this. It was accepted – but we needed to implement by the end of the financial year – less than four months away. Normally, we would have planned twice as long for this type of data warehouse project.”

The solution: A new, fully functional InView database and support to prepare and migrate

CACI agreed to work with Stephen and his team to deliver a new InView data warehouse against the tight deadline. Stephen explains, “CACI provided overall consultancy to plan the data warehouse migration. With many vacancies in our data team, we also used CACI consultants to backfill. Due to time and resource constraints, we didn’t have as much engagement with the information team and data team as we wanted. Moreover, some of our old source systems and extracts didn’t have an Information Asset Owner or anyone who understood the data architecture fully. We had to do a lot of interrogation analysis to bridge this knowledge gap. We wouldn’t have been able to deliver the project without CACI’s support with this.”

CACI’s consultants worked with Stephen’s team to implement the latest version of the InView data warehouse for healthcare organisations. It brings together feeds from in-patient, outpatient, critical care, the old maternity system, neo-natal and paediatric and some community and extended data (from InfoFlex) that adds richness and detail to patient records – for example, information from GP discharge letters.

Torbay and South Devon’s core project embraced the core data feeds they knew best. Stephen’s team set a stretch goal to bring some of the Trust’s community data in. This was particularly challenging, as it was poorly defined and spread over eight systems.

Stephen says, “Some of the services had started setting up their own booking systems outside our main PAS and using InfoFlex. Drawing on CACI’s expertise and resources, we were able to merge these in, which has made our data more complete and accurate again.”

To improve outputs and reporting, the team replaced a daily, fixed format export routine originally written in the 1980s. They built new feeds for demographic, inpatient and outpatient data from the SWIFT bed management system.

The benefits: Data best practice from a proven solution and trusted partner

Torbay and South Devon NHS Trust could have chosen to build its own custom solution. But InView has a powerful advantage. Stephen explains: “If we create anything bespoke, we have to support it. And we don’t have capacity.”

There has been a big shift because of Covid – the NHS is moving towards a more standardised national view of income. “InView means we can accommodate national SUS calculations and keep pace as our obligations increase each year, because it uses a recognised best practice approach. With InView, we have a proven, standard platform and can make local adjustments for a perfect fit to our organisation,” says Stephen.

For ongoing support, CACI’s team is responsible for upgrades and loading new tariffs. Stephen can focus his own engineers on getting the data right. This is key, because some of NHS England’s payment to the Trust relies on it. Stephen gives an example: “We discovered that a percentage of our outpatient activity had the wrong consultant speciality, which potentially reduces our national NHS income. With CACI maintaining InView, I have the resources to investigate and rectify that type of issue.”

“The beauty of working with CACI is that they take ownership of everything they promise in the scope of the agreement, and fix it. They provided excellent project management. I didn’t have to chase up work or check every detail – you can only do that with real trust in the team’s capability and judgement to escalate when needed.”

“The InView data warehouse is a product that will last us ten or more years – it’s our one source of data for all key reporting so it’s a critical solution for the Trust. Amongst the many programmes I’m responsible for, it was a relief not to have to worry about this one, because CACI has earned our trust and confidence throughout a long working relationship. CACI’s engineers are extremely experienced and were able to jump in, ask intelligent questions, and deal with unfamiliar and unusual data feeds and systems! The project manager provided excellent communication throughout, so I didn’t need to intervene and always knew the latest status and progress.”
Peter Sheard, IT Programme Manager, Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust

CACI and North Bristol NHS Trust collaborate for NHS Nightingale hospital Bristol project

Posted on: 24 June 2021
CACI and North Bristol NHS Trust collaborate for NHS Nightingale hospital Bristol project

At the beginning of April 2020, North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) was asked by NHS England to host the new NHS Nightingale hospital being built at the University of the West of England’s (UWE Bristol) Frenchay campus. In addition to hosting the Nightingale Bristol, they needed the ability to fulfil both operational and financial reporting and the statutory submissions of core Inpatient Commissioning Data sets.

As a valued customer of CACI and large user of the CACI NHS Data warehouse InView, NBT turned to our Business Intelligence (BI) team to implement a solution that would meet the statutory requirements within a critical timescale. The solution would need to produce key statutory reporting as well as integrate with the trusts existing processes and reporting toolset.

Implementing the right solution in a small timeframe

To meet the requirements and timetable, CACI knew the best solution would be to implement a version of the trust’s data warehouse environment, specifically for the Nightingale Bristol data. This solution would provide a consistent set of data structures that trust staff understood and allow for the re-use of existing outputs already in use.

Taking this approach would mean using InView, which CACI had been appointed to implement in 2017 and had been successfully live at the trust since 2018. As InView is modular by design, CACI could quickly implement all of the key elements need to meet the functional requirements for the Nightingale Bristol.

As CACI maintains InView to national standards, this would give the trust the ability to group the data as standard and produce statutory CDS submission out of the box. Alongside this, by using the same data structures to the trust’s data warehouse, the solution would be able to re-use existing processes for processing SLAM files and reporting data, using the trust’s current reports and dashboard applications

The CACI BI team managed the implementation of the project on behalf of the trust and provided the support through the user testing process.

What NBT have to say

Based at UWE Bristol’s Exhibition and Conference Centre, the NHS Nightingale Hospital Bristol is hosted by North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) and staffed by people from many NHS organisations across the south west as well as volunteers. It will provide up to 300 intensive care beds for people with COVID-19, if local services need them.

Speaking to the CACI team about the project, David Hale, Assistant Director of Informatics: Business Intelligence (NBT) told us:

“As part of hosting the regional Nightingale response, North Bristol NHS Trust engaged CACI to support the development of our statutory data processing and reporting via their InView platform. CACI’s response was immediate and comprehensive. CACI representatives formed part of an expert virtual team – spanning multiple organisations – working solidly for three weeks to enable the Nightingale Bristol facility to become operationally ready on time. The success of CACI’s involvement emphasises the importance of excellent relationships and close collaboration when faced with an urgent need. We thank CACI for their valuable support and partnership as part of North Bristol NHS Trust’s Nightingale response.”

You can find out more about our work with NBT here, or to find out more about the actionable insight solutions we provide across the NHS, visit our healthcare page.