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