by Aislinn Gannon and Jim Curran

Tell your story with data

Imagine you’re running a busy community health organisation with a team dedicated to delivering top-notch care, but something is not quite working. Despite best efforts, appointments are missed, resources are stretched thin and your teams are spending hours wading through paper files and spreadsheets compiling information for returns. All of this effort takes people away from clinical care while simultaneously trying to meet the growing demands on your service.

What if you had a clear, visual dashboard that could instantly tell you where your resources are needed most? A tool that lets you see, at a glance, where your patients are coming from, what conditions are most prevalent in your area, and how your services are performing in real-time. That’s exactly what we’ve been doing with a number of community health organisations over the last year.

First things first

We recently completed work with several Community Health organisations to roll out a highly adaptable care coordination system to better manage the process for standardising and coordinating referrals, triage and treatment for over 2 million patients. Previously, services were trying to manage very complex patient pathways using a combination of excel spreadsheets, local knowledge and relying on the experience and insight of key back office staff and management teams

The new system was delivered to help simplify the chaos—creating a single view of each patient and their journey through the healthcare system. While this solution continues to evolve as the services better understand it, after several months collecting data through this new system, there was a realisation that a treasure trove of insights had built up.

Enter PowerBI (or whatever flavour you prefer)

The thing is, it’s all very well having data, but you need it to be able to tell a story. To that end, we agreed an approach to unlock the full potential of the data being gathered using, in this case, Microsoft’s PowerBI tool. Over the last two months, we started developing bespoke PowerBI reports to transform the raw data into vivid, interactive dashboards. And while they do look nice and are very adaptable, the true value lies in what they say.

For example, working with one community health organisation, we developed a set of reports that has allowed healthcare managers to see exactly how resources are being use. By showing which healthcare specialists are seeing how many patients, further categorised by the severity of their conditions – management can better evaluate workload distribution and ensure the appropriate skills and experience are applied where needed.

Some examples of what the reports have shown so far include:

• Almost 30% of clinical information is not currently being collected
• The complexity of cases has been increasing
• Visual Mapping of where referrals are coming from
• Showed a gender difference in the development of certain conditions

And the impact has been immediate. One manager told us that for the first time, they could see clearly where their services were overstretched and where they had capacity to spare. This meant they could reallocate resources more effectively, ensuring that no patient fell through the cracks.

Spotting trends, making interventions

These reports are also starting to uncover trends that were previously invisible. Our team of experienced clinical and operational people, population health management experts, data analytics folk and project change managers, worked with the community health leaders to translate this new information into real, deliverable outputs. 

In our work with one organisation, a simple demographic dashboard highlighted a worrying concentration of at-risk patients in a specific area. This insight has allowed a targeted intervention which has already started to reduce hospital admissions. That’s the power of data when it’s presented in a way that makes sense.

Re-design your service with confidence

So, what does this mean for you? It means you no longer have to rely on gut feeling or incomplete information. With these reports, you can get a clear view of what’s happening in your organisation, and make the kind of informed decisions that drive real improvement. We’re just getting started, but the early results are promising. The services that have embraced these tools are already seeing the benefits.

An investment in better data will enable smarter spending. By identifying trends and understanding why certain areas of healthcare are experiencing increased costs allows for targeted interventions. For example, implementing preventative measures for high-risk groups, ultimately reduces the need for costly acute treatments in the future.

Whether you’re looking at a national, regional, or local snapshot, the ability to quickly understand your data and act on it is a game-changer.

If you’re interested…

… to see what your data can do – we’re here to help you get the most from it. You can contact any of our team at health@the4oc.com or via our contact page.

Next Week: Part 2.

We have two follow up posts – firstly, next week from Anastasia Koveza – sharing her thoughts on how to utilise dashboards to drive improvements in quality and efficiency, and ultimately a better experience for patients. 

Anastasia is a Population Health Expert with extensive analytical experience and was previously a surgeon. She has effectively used her expertise to redesign healthcare services and has created many insightful dashboards for health services across Europe.