Business intelligence saves lives at Colchester Hospital University NHS Trust

Trust claims efficiency savings of £45,000 after replacing Analyser with QlikView

Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust (CHUFT) has reported savings of about £45,000 and saved 115 more lives since implementing a suite of QlikView applications last year.

In 2010, the trust had a problem with its patient-care standards and Department of Health regulators told CHUFT that its methodology on counting widgets (part of a user interface that displays an information arrangement changeable by the user) and transacting its vast volume of data was inconsistent and not in line with national guidance.

The problem was associated with the technology it was using at the time: Strategy Companion's Analyser tool, according to CHUFT's transformation associate director Orlando Agrippa.

"In 2010, the CIO at the time looked at vendors and chose Analyser, but the problem with the product, and many other products, was that it did not do what the organisation needed which was the swift real-time accurate delivery of intelligence through any part of the organisation," he said.

After proposing the implementation of QlikView last year, it took two months for the CHUFT board to sign off, initially investing a small amount to test the product and from that point on the trust has deployed dashboards for various different data sets including cancer, diagnostics and patient attendances.

Agrippa claimed that CHUFT looked at other vendors at a big data analytics event but QlikView was much easier to use than other vendors' tools.

"What we recognised is that a lot of vendors sell their kit on the cheap but the deployment of it will cost you an arm because it is very difficult to build apps and deploy rapidly, and the costs are not in balance. However, QlikView is a bit of a Maserati as it is easy to deal with whereas if you buy a Skoda and you want to turn it into a Masareti it is a bit of a challenge," he explained.

"QlikView is slick and easy to deploy, it is intuitive and easy to use but many other kits can do the same thing. What QlikView has in addition, is an online community like no other that really drive the agenda. We never had that with the Analyser product; there was no community, little support and it made it more difficult for us," he added.

Business intelligence saves lives at Colchester Hospital University NHS Trust

Trust claims efficiency savings of £45,000 after replacing Analyser with QlikView

An example of how the trust was restricted in its approach with the initial product was the mortality report it used to send out.

"We used to send out a mortality report that went out once a week or month on an absolutely massive spreadsheet with a pivot table. But the clinicians did not know how to use the pivot and would only be able to see mortalities so if Mr X came in and passed away, then clinicians would not be able to see that until [the next report was sent around] which was not acceptable," Agrippa said.

"One of the QlikView dashboards we built looked at mortalities but also allowed us to look at mortality by consultant, by ward, by speciality and many other details. In the first year of using the dashboard we have seen 13 fewer people dying a month because we can look at outcomes of people who did die - and we can say we've done this or could have done this to Mr X or Mrs X," he claimed.

Agrippa admitted that the number of people being saved was not entirely because of the QlikView technology.

"In terms of having hard evidence to unequivocally prove that it was because of QlikView's technology, then we'd have to have a bit of research," he said. "For example, if we stopped using QlikView we could see if the mortality rate would go back up.

"I would say 40 per cent of the reasoning behind the reduction can be attributed to the kit and within that, 10 per cent would be due to ‘natural variation'. This would mean that the kit alone allowed us to save 46 lives. The other 60 per cent would be operational."

QlikView is based on QBD files which are deployed through a web-portal similar to many other information technology infrastructure libraries (ITIL).

"An example of deployment was with cancer databases which have got millions of rules in it and to develop that in any facet would take a long time. Once we got QlikView in May of last year, we rapidly deployed the cancer app in only a month and deployed it to about 60 users.

"In eight months we deployed most if not all the core applications that we needed to - whereas with Analyser it took us a year to deploy one app," Agrippa stated.

The whole process used to take 251 hours to do a suite of reports and now takes the trust only 50 hours.

CHUFT initially invested about £25,000 on the kit and Agrippa said that it has since amassed a 200 per cent saving on that or "efficiencies of about £45,000".

As the trust has been able to prove that it meets its Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQI) criteria set by the Department of Health, it has been able to secure £3m in funding for transitional work that it still needs to carry out.