Last year, the Visual Analytics Team at the East London NHS Foundation Trust won our Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Healthcare Data Analytics for the apps they developed to assist decision-making in mental and community health. They used data visualisation software to provide staff in East London, Luton and Bedfordshire clinical and non-clinical information so that they could better understand wait times, review their caseloads, gain insights into patients’ demographics and be alerted in advance of serious incidents.
Dr Amar Shah, chief quality officer at East London NHS Foundation Trust, spoke with us about their project, its impact, and the what the Florence Nightingale Award means to them.
The Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Healthcare Data Analytics is supported by the Health Foundation, an independent charitable organisation working to build a healthier UK. Entries are now being accepted for the 2023 award.
What prompted you to develop these apps? What gaps did you see that you were hoping to address?
As a clinician, I can see how information is absolutely critical to making better decisions. And yet, when it comes to our information systems, it was hard to find the relevant information, it was scattered in lots of different places, and you had to be at an NHS Trust computer in order to access it. We aimed to create something that wrapped around what teams at the point of care need, in order to provide a better service and to make sure all the necessary information was in a single place, easy to understand and available from any device.
How did you decide to proceed as you did? How did you bring partners on board?
This was a major, long-term project that has involved a wholesale redesign of our data architecture at the back end, whilst also redesigning all of our front-end data analytics. We brought together a team, which included a range of clinical, performance, data and finance experts. We conducted an options appraisal to review what our choice of business intelligence platform should be. We also recognised that we didn’t have the internal capability to do this work ourselves, and so partnered with a Microsoft Gold Partner to provide us with guidance and expert support over several years.
What has been the most transformative aspect of this new data visualisation for your teams and patients?
The greatest impact has been the transparency and access to data. Now, anyone can view data on their service, at any time, from anywhere. Not everyone is as familiar with the data, or how to interpret it. But the act of making it available starts to create some curiosity. People start to appreciate that their decisions might be better informed by looking at the data, and start seeing opportunities for better analysis. Many of our teams have now integrated data in totally novel ways into the way that they function – from safety huddles, to real-time boards on our wards.
How are you hoping to build on this to continue to improve the use of data across your teams?
There is still much to do, in order to harness the power of all of our complex data systems in a simple way to provide useful intelligence. As an example, we are testing the use of an early warning system, which brings together statistical process control charts on multiple measures, for multiple wards, to give us clues in advance of a ward requiring additional support and attention. The last two years of work to improve our back-end data architecture and environment so that it is in the cloud and properly structured, means that all our teams can now access data by 7:30am every day. Previously this was only possible by 1 or 2pm. We want to start exploring the possibilities of automation and big data next.
How could this solution be adopted and used by other parts of the healthcare system and other areas of the country?
Much of what we’ve created is already available to others. PowerBI didn’t have any custom visuals that allowed us to view data as statistical process control charts. We’ve built these, in partnership with a Microsoft Gold Partner, and the EasySPC solution is now available on the Microsoft Store for anyone to purchase.
What does winning this award mean to you? How do you think this award has helped you to achieve your vision/aim and what are your next steps?
It has been fantastic to see the amazing work of the informatics and BI department at East London NHS Foundation Trust recognised in this way. We know the work we’re doing is ground-breaking. But it’s also really hard, and takes a long time. It’s important to stop, reflect and celebrate at points along this journey. The award has brought renewed energy and inspiration to the team.
What would your advice be to others looking to harness data to improve health outcomes?
Data can spark curiosity, which in turn helps us learn and make better decisions. This work has been part of our long-term aspiration to become more improvement-focused as an organisation – taking a systematic approach to understanding and solving our most complex problems. Data is a core part of this, and our teams are now hungrier for data than they have ever been. Healthcare has some of the richest datasets of any industry – there is so much that we could do better, if we understand where to focus, and if we used data to guide our everyday decisions about how to improve care for our patients and local communities.