Microsoft Business Intelligence Solution also Cuts 18 Week Pathway Reporting from Three Days to Five Minutes per Week
London, 6th October 2009 –
21c today announces that NHS South West Essex Community Services has deployed its specialist
Microsoft-based Business Intelligence (BI) solutions as the backbone of the
18 week patient pathway and
performance scorecard analysis for Community Services. By enhancing the existing Microsoft infrastructure and leveraging the national NHS agreement with Microsoft, Community Services has dramatically improved the efficiency, cost and accuracy of its reporting. The pilot phase, which encompassed six of the 50 community services in south west Essex has already reduced query times for the 18 week pathway from three working days per week, to just five minutes; an improvement of over 99%.
Julie Price, Head of Performance and Business Development at NHS South West Essex Community Services explains, “The level of human resource required to report against just six of our community services was already challenging. To scale that manual process across all 50 was simply not viable. Like many NHS trusts, we use
SystmOne for patient data but have been struggling to get it to report in a useful way for the Community Services teams. We met 21c for a demonstration of document management systems, and quickly understood the potential to report and create dashboards by amalgamating data warehouse feeds from our numerous systems. Now we’re working with dynamic information, instead of data that’s a month out of date, which has empowered us to work proactively rather than reactively.”
Paul Henderson, Managing Director at 21c continues, “Many NHS organisations are wrestling to analyse data held in lots of different systems and NHS South West Essex Community Services was no different. Breaking down these information silos and getting systems such as those for finance, HR and clinical operations to talk to each other is critical to not only the delivery of good patient care, but to accurate, useful and timely business intelligence. Whether the challenge is the 18 week patient pathway, performance scorecards or resource planning, the technical BI solution is often conceptually similar. The real trick is delivering it quickly, cost effectively and with tools that are easy for the NHS workers to use.”
In practice, the new 21c Microsoft infrastructure is already making a visible difference. Able to deliver high level data to the board for an overview of the organisation, with just a few clicks, it can also drill down to detailed daily data; even to patient level. In district nursing for example, the team can now report on budgeting, staff sickness and turnover, number of patients seen and even analyse clinical data such as what is generating most of its work; dressings, post operative care and so on.
Price continues, “Our buying decision followed a thorough scoping exercise and a reference with some of the London NHS trusts that have a similar reporting challenge with
RiO. The solution was delivered in just 30 working days; something we simply could not have resourced ourselves internally. Our information team were stunned at how well the 21c programmers worked and at their ability to deliver such accuracy and visually pleasing interfaces, so quickly. Bringing such modern technology into the NHS feels like a massive leap forward.”
Price also reports that the Clinical Services Directors and Deputy Managing Director at NHS South West Essex Community Services are impressed with the degree of data they can access and link through to patient care. It will not only make every business unit accountable for its own service and resources, but provide the necessary evidence that patients are being seen in a timely manner. This is vital for driving change and improvements.
The 21c solution at NHS South West Essex Community Services is entirely Microsoft based; with just two additional tools installed. Users report feeling comfortable working with a familiar interface on a tried and tested platform. The next phase of the initiative is for the BI system to embrace all services included in the 18 week wait project and roll out of performance scorecards to all services using SystmOne; which is expected to be complete by January 2010.
