Data solutions for Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) are a major acute and community trust dedicated to providing the best possible healthcare. Operating across 5 hospital sites and numerous community locations, they invest around £300m each year, in order to design their services around the needs of their patients.

The challenge

In 2014, WWL saw an opportunity for change. After years of working stuck between two data warehouse versions, the WWL team were consumed by delays, hours of manual processing and a solution that was unreliable and not fit for purpose. As Mark Singleton, Associate Director of IM&T at the trust would later describe, “the future didn’t look bright” – they needed something better.

As increasing mergers and collaboration between trusts was starting to take place, the business case for a new solution emerged, one that would meet all of their requirements, starting with a single version of the truth.

WWL looked at their options, knowing they needed a single data warehouse solution and while in the past this may have been done in house, the trust concluded this wouldn’t meet the timeframe objectives, and with that in mind went out to tender for a partner to help bring in this solution.

The solution – A first implementation of InView

CACI were initially appointed by WWL to implement their proposed solution: InView Express.

The InView data warehouse solution was specifically designed for the NHS market and in December 2014 when CACI were appointed by WWL, it had already been implemented in trusts across the UK.

WWL could see the design of InView had incorporated the complexities required for an NHS data warehouse. It would allow them to produce the trust’s national datasets and statutory returns and bring all siloed data sources into a single data warehouse, providing an accurate and co-ordinated view of the trust’s services. Plus, with the intuitive environment of InView, users across the trust would be able view and analyse the data easily, and subsequently make effective decisions in an efficient way.

Thinking of the future ahead, WWL took the decision to take on all of the InView modules at the beginning, providing the capability to grow as they took on new data sources. This would provide an invaluable decision in 2019 when the trust took on community and mental health services.

Growing data volumes

After benefiting from the InView solution for a few years and expanding its use, a new challenge appeared ahead: an increase of services. WWL were to take on Community and Mental Health services, and this was a significant increase to their services and data.

Mark Singleton (Associate Director of IM&T at WWL) explains that “it’s not everyday that you’re being asked to grow services by 20-25%”, and that taking on these new areas would bring with it many different national datasets that the trust had never dealt with before.

With additional returns and outputs due in a short space of time, WWL turned to CACI’s experience in working with Community data to help them develop these new datasets in order to meet the national standard.

Outcomes for WWL

Since implementing InView and later expanding it to support the new trust requirements, WWL now have a reliable foundation which frees up capacity to focus on analysis of data and more strategic goals.

The team no longer spend time troubleshooting issues or hours processing data manually and can take on proactive improvements in house such as developing SQL.

WWL are making the most of the robustness of InView, with their database projected to be almost 2tb by 2021. For the trust this is invaluable, as with some tables containing over 150 million records, they are able to record and manage vast amounts of historical data.

As CACI have invested and improved InView over the past few years, WWL are also utilising the regular updates in order to continually improve and evolve their reporting. Recently WWL have been looking at semantic reporting as a next step to improving the consolidated view of data across the trust and will be further enhancing their deployment by using the new InView Extensions functionality

By optimising their use of InView, focusing on data analysis and striving to be a data-driven organisation through continual improvements, WWL are empowered to make efficiency savings, and improve the quality of care for the patients across Wigan.

To find out more about InView and our work in the NHS, read more here.