For almost a decade NHS hospitals across England have been collecting patient non-identifiable data, to help understand how their services are used. One of the more commonly known data-sets relates to emergency care being delivered by 140+ A&E departments across the country.
Technology start-up Draper Dash (D&D) has worked with their technology partner, Qlik, to develop a mechanism for harnessing A&E data and sharing it through a tailored report for each hospital. The reports are produced for free and sent to NHS chief executive officers, chief operating officers and senior managers on a weekly basis.
The reports provide detailed analysis of A&E activity. They also rank A&E performance over a number of years and, thanks to a set of free apps, enable trusts to interact with the data and benchmark themselves against the rest of England
Orlando Agrippa is D&D's Director of Analytics and a deputy chief information officer of an NHS trust. He explains why D&D introduced the report: "We were concerned that our colleagues in the NHS did not have time to download and manipulate the data they were producing. We wanted to provide easy access and visibility to the hospitals."
The D&D team felt that too many organisations were suffering from a data storm and that they could do something to help executives, clinicians and managers interpret the information more effectively and make more informed decisions.
The D&D reports are designed to help hospitals absorb the data they produce and generate intelligence that can improve performance.
A big part of D&D's drive is to find a way to free-up two to three extra hours each day for clinical, operational and executives, so they can find innovative, lasting solutions to some of the issues within the NHS.
D&D is now looking to introduce new reports that will provide insight for the NHS into a range of other areas. Later this year the team will release a series of reports into research studies using patient non-identifiable data drawn from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) clinical research network's portfolio of studies. The aim of the report will be to harness readily available research data to drive forward a greater profile for, and delivery of, clinical research in hospitals.
The D&D team is excited about the level of visibility which could be brought to healthcare research and studies within the UK and the NIHR clinical research network is interested to see the impact it will have on research awareness within the NHS.
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