University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust improves patient care with Qlik advanced analytics

Within a large geography and topography and receiving approximately 100,000 A&E and 40,000 emergency inpatients a year, UHMBT was under pressure to manage an increasing volume of patients. By using Qlik, the Trust has empowered its staff to work more efficiently alongside technology, by immersing them in crucial data to improve performance in their day-to-day roles. Whether part of the senior leadership team or one of the hospitals’ operational staff, all UHMBT staff are benefitting from increased availability of data, allowing them to take an overarching view or drill down into granular detail if required.

In particular, UHMBT has used Qlik Sense and collaborative design to develop a hospital command centre in just three months, a physical and intuitive hub where human intuition meets advanced analytics. The command centre is predictive, mobile and scalable, and contains screens charting various facets of hospital flow, from the arrival of ambulances through to patients being discharged. For example, this provides staff with real-time information on bed management, something that hospitals traditionally find difficult, allowing them to manage current bed stock and predict changing demand to enable pre-emptive action. In future, the Trust aspires to install a public facing view of command centre data, so that patients have sight of live updates on wait times and bed availability.

Crucially, the adoption of advanced analytics has been designed with the natural workflow of hospital employees in mind, enhancing traditional working practices. For example, employees from across the Trust including clinical, operational and estate staff, congregate at the command centre for patient flow meetings at least four times a day to view live data on large screens. Ultimately, the improved availability of data has made staff meetings shorter, more focused and more evidence-based, freeing up time to spend on improving the patient experience and saving lives.

As a result, the Trust has observed several benefits, including an increase in the number of patients triaged by the emergency department within 15 minutes, as well as improved visibility of outliers such as medical patients being treated in a non-medical ward.

Beyond the benefits to the Trust as a whole, the availability of advanced analytics has also enhanced the data skills of individuals. By involving staff in the design process, incorporating feedback from operational and clinical stakeholders, the analytics strategy has been developed around how they could best use data in their respective roles. This iterative method has instilled a culture of data literacy in all staff, encouraging them to regularly question and interrogate what data is available and how useful it is, to accrue maximum value.

“Our Trust covers a significant area of around 1,000m2 – a terrain and size which lends itself perfectly to innovative digital solutions with a dispersed space and difficult transportation to connect. It is crucial that our staff are able to deliver the highest standard of patient care as efficiently as possible in this area,” commented Rob O’Neill, head of information at UHMBT. “Advanced analytics is helping us achieve this by immersing employees in real-time data, allowing them to pre-empt and react quickly to changing demand. Initiatives such as our command centre enhance the work of employees at all levels, providing them with a platform to combine evidence with intuition. Qlik gives us a complete and flexible solution that is device agnostic and helps us drive digital transformation; we can design and re-design around our users’ evolving needs, regularly updating through a rapid development cycle to ensure that every aspect of our employee interface is adding value.”

“While many NHS organisations are realising the potential of advanced analytics, our work with UHMBT is evidence of how data has the power to disrupt established working practices,” added Sean Price, EMEA director, industry solutions – public sector and healthcare at Qlik. “In the dynamic environments found in the healthcare industry, it is important for solutions to be flexible based on the needs of the specific users within an organisation. The potential for advanced analytics is proving significant and can be harnessed by the entire public sector to help meet unique challenges and ultimately, help save lives.”