Christie NHS Foundation Trust uses Tableau analytics to improve care for cancer patients
Better data dashboards help improve patient care at the Trust
The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, the largest single-site cancer centre in Europe, has improved patient care by using Tableau business analytics software.
Based in Manchester, the Trust treats more than 44,000 patients every year. It switched from its previous data analytics provider, it claims, because it didn't offer fast enough insight for busy clinicians and nurses.
The Trust now has an online portal for its 2,500 medical staff, which they can use to view Trust data and gain insights into patient care and treatment outcomes.
Christie NHS Foundation Trust isn't the first UK health centre to deploy Tableau analytics, the Claire House Children's Hospice already uses the business intelligence tool, which it implemented to help improve data analysis.
According to Daniel Tibble, head of business intelligence and software development at the Christie NHS Trust, the deployment of Tableau has provided hospital staff with better data dashboards, enabling them to offer improved patient care.
"It's about putting data in the hands of the decision makers when they need it. A lot of our dashboards centre on vital patient-care delivery, so anything we can offer that makes that faster and better directly contributes to better medical care," said Tibble.
"Presentation of data can be as important as its processing. We've found that by improving the delivery of the format, staff are able to use the systems faster and more effectively, something that Tableau excels at," he continued.
Tibble added that he's keen for the Trust to share its experience with other hospitals in order to help improve patient care across the NHS. "We are keen to share our experience with Tableau to help the wider healthcare community learn from our work with critical data and ultimately affect patient outcomes," he said.
Tableau has been deployed throughout the Trust. The business analytics tools are used by nurses and doctors on the front line, as well as behind the scenes by staff in such areas as finance and administration.
According to the Trust, that means employees in all sections of the hospital have more time for patients, rather than searching for, and reporting, information.
Nurses, for example, can use the clincial portal to record important clinical data straight into an online database rather than writing it down, as they would have in the past, then use Tableau to quickly surface it.
This enables other nurses and consultants to quickly gain access to that information through an online portal, instead of having to search for it in a database. It means that staff can quickly gain access to information about patients ahead of their appointments.
James Eiloart, vice president EMEA of Tableau Software, highlighted the results the implementation has achieved for the Trust.
"Value is derived from data only when it provides useful insights that can inform effective decisions. In the case of The Christie, Tableau is enabling users to gather the kind of insights that can deliver tangible life-changing results to a range of front-line services at the speed of thought," he said.
"We're using Tableau to provide insight. It's really a self-service data analytics capability that Tableau is providing, which lets staff really drill into the data themselves," Dean Jones, head of data science at the National Trust told Computing.