We were put in mind of our conversations earlier this year with Oracle and other vendors whose healthcare data warehouse platforms and attendant applications were being demonstrated as solutions to both research and performance measurement problems - this in turn called to mind the comments we had heard from data experts coming into healthcare from other industries who could not understand why information of all kinds pertinent to the administration of healthcare, from genomic analyses to staff costs, were not seen as belonging to a single and vitally important information asset.
The concerns of this London hospital in getting a handle on their data were strikingly similar to those of the research institutes we have spoken with - and indeed what they describe as performance management is really research by another name - when they correlate outcomes with treatment modalities and different packages of care, they are using their Business Intelligence architecture in many ways like a clinical research engine but with the addition of financial data .
Their core issue is data quality - they currently have four main clinical IT systems - one for each borough subsumed into their organisation. Trying to use these to derive information even at the level of 'number of patient encounters' has not been straightforward. Although they didn't go into it, we should imagine that supporting those clinical systems must be an array of systems capturing e.g. pathology, radiology, cytology data at a more granular level.
In addition, their financial data resides in three ledgers each with different coding - a 'consolidation nightmare' was how they described the move to a single ledger; painful but essential as they attempt to get a grip on expenditure.
The introduction of Service Line Reporting of income and expenditure (in order to assess profit by service) is driving their data validation and data quality improvement - but their clinical operations requirement to deliver an integrated service, developing 'packages of care' rather than looking at individual activities related to the same condition in isolation, is also dependent on quality and timely data - both financial and clinical performance management require the facility to benchmark accurately.
Touching on other IT issues their organisation faces, they mentioned that the mobile workforce are not well supported by technology - "it's still a surprise that no-one has developed a good mobile working solution for healthcare in the UK". Their words, not ours! They did suggest complications which we hadn't thought of hitherto, coming from a tertiary care background as we do, for example nurses on home visits may not be able to work online, thus need data stored locally to upload later which means on-device storage of personal identifiable data. We can't believe that is still an issue from a technological perspective, however, we can imagine that risk-aversion in respect of personal data in the healthcare industry is dampening demand for solutions - anyone care to offer a more informed opinion?All comments welcome!
We were really interested to hear how they addressed the development of their Business Intelligence capabilities - developing KPIs to meet significant and varied requirements from different commissioners. Their previous dashboards had been provided by NHS London - their goal at that time had been to ensure compliance with standards and regulations but as they have matured they now have to develop their own dashboards to meet more complex internally-driven reporting requirements. To do this, they have their own Performance and Information team who work on data collation and aggregation - creating Performance Packs - which provide detail by Service line under headings such as Operations, Quality, Finance, Workforce etc. supported by detailed analysis across the board from hard to soft data.
The capacity to present a performance summary across directorates has led to internal competition which is already leading to performance improvements. Their next steps?
the P&I teams are looking to automate the production of their performance packs and to create an overall dashboard for the organisation, leading in turn to a Balanced Scorecard.
Having realised that their previous KPIs and the systems which provided the data were inadequate, they embarked on a redesign of their processes by, and in this order!:
- Defining the goals / purpose / vision of the organisation
- Asking what information they need to support the delivery of these
- Asking what KPIs would adequately measure their delivery
- Then developing the systems which support the provision of the answers to the above
They are no longer looking simply at meeting regulatory reporting requirements - but at using their data internally to drive their performance - they are setting up data quality fora - having an external data quality audit and linking their output data to their income - and beginning to realise the benefits of placing data at the heart of the organisation.
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