How InView enhanced Stockport’s data collection & processing capabilities

Background:  

When Stockport NHS Foundation Trust first looked to procure a data warehouse, they were adamant about choosing a provider with a proven track record and experience of delivering products and services to the NHS. Following recommendations and success stories from other users of CACI’s NHS data warehouse solution, InView, it was clear that a partnership with CACI would guarantee Stockport a smooth process with a mature and established provider. 

Challenge:  

Stockport needed one platform that would contain all data in one place to simplify the collection process and help the team regain control of their data. Over the years, numerous reporting database tables evolved to the point that multiple individual servers were created. This resulted in many duplications with multiple databases across multiple tables, data not being consolidated or structured, analysts having to work across servers and inconsistent information being produced. Having one unified platform would ensure that everyone would pull data from the same source and would avoid analysts working in silos and creating their own new sources of data. A consolidated data platform would provide much needed resilience and structure. 

Stockport also wanted to take control of their statutory data processing and reporting. They needed flexibility and control over their own data developments, including more automated data submissions and reporting. 

Solution:

CACI’s InView equipped Stockport with a mature data platform that has defined all statutory returns and commissioning datasets. It supports the team’s existing grouping and pricing processes and significantly reduces their month end manual processing, freeing up their time to dedicate their efforts to additional data analysis instead.

Through InView, the team also gained access to a unique support desk headed by a team of CACI’s technical experts, ensuring that any issues arising at Stockport could be mitigated precisely and timely.

“You don’t normally get someone that could just as easily have developed the product on a support line. [Our CACI support lead] knows InView inside out… not only does he know the products, but he also knows NHS data quite well,” Rory MacDonald, Lead Analyst at Stockport, explained. 

“We have a lot of confidence in the fact that CACI’s [team of customer care individuals] understand NHS data and keep up to date on policy decisions to be able to respond quickly to changes,” Debbie Hope, Chief Data Officer at Stockport, continued.

Stockport was also able to identify gaps in the recording of patient observations, with a customised InView module specially developed by another one of CACI’s delivery support leads to enhance Stockport’s reporting capabilities. Through InView, the team could rest assured that all statutory elements would be addressed and that building any added functionalities within the platform would be done quickly and easily.  

The latest enhancement that CACI’s delivery support lead is developing for Stockport is for their audiology data extraction and collection, whereby data is extracted from their system and data quality reports are being created to find any issues. This helps Stockport streamline some of their diagnostic waiting times reporting.  

Results / Benefits:  

• According to Rory, CACI’s consultancy and support has far exceeded the organisation’s expectations. “The consultants were all really good in terms of both their technical expertise and dynamic advice,” he commented. 
• A noticeable reduction in the overall time spent processing overnight. After setting up a delta load, Stockport realised that every piece of information in their system dating back from the 1980s was being copied over. This process took progressively longer each day because the amount of data being copied over was continuously increasing. They worked with CACI on setting up a delta load where they could identify using interface messages, pull any necessary information and load it into the data warehouse, which significantly sped up the processing time.  
• The availability of data. “It’s available to be reported on from early in the morning,” Rory explained. 
• The enhanced data warehouse solution allowed Stockport to produce their own national CDS extracts. “We were reliant on and restricted to the pace of our PAS supplier previously for the development of those extracts when there were national changes,” Debbie explained. “We’ve removed that reliance and taken full control of those national extracts.” 
• Moving away from manually processing commissioner assignment within the PAS system. “It was a very manual process for using the contracting functionality within our patient administration system to assign the Commissioner for who pays for a particular piece of activity,” Rory explained. “Now that we’ve got all the national commissioner assignment method (CAM) rules written in the data warehouse, we’ve been able to switch off the functionality on the PAS system and transform the work of our data quality team.”  

Outcomes/Future:   

Stockport’s future ambitions include completely switching off all of the old servers with the legacy reporting databases so that the organisation can have only one development server and one production server for the data warehouse. They are also keen to increase the provision of real-time reporting. CACI will continue to support Stockport by analysing patient flow and frequently refreshing in-patient data to help Stockport understand exactly who is in the hospital at that time, what service they may be waiting for and how waiting times can be reduced, and overall support with the maintenance of their data warehouse.