Cwm Taf University Health Board chooses Qlik to improve patient care
Welsh health board selects visualisation platform from Qlik Sense to give staff technology to improve patient waiting times, length of stay and overall care
Qlik has announced that Cwm Taf University Health Board will be deploying Qlik Sense across the organisation to help improve patient care.
The health board will primarily use the platform to reduce both the length of patient stay and clinical waiting times across its services.
With this purchase, Cwm Taf University Health Board will be leveraging both QlikView and Qlik Sense to address the need for guided analytics and self-service visualisation across the organisation.
Cwm Taf University Health Board is responsible for providing healthcare services to the population of Merthyr Tydfil and Rhondda Cynon Taf in Wales, estimated to be approximately 289,400 people. It delivers a full range of hospital and community-based services and comprises of two district general hospitals, five community hospitals, and a state-of-the-art university health park. It employs 7,000 members of staff, making it the second largest employer in the area.
The NHS, perhaps more than any other organisation, is under constant pressure to find ways to operate more efficiently while still reducing costs. One of the most-effective ways to do this is by making more-effective use of a resource they already have - organisational data
The Health Board wanted to find a way to make better use of its data across the organisation and, based on its existing experience using QlikView data analysis software, chose data visualisation platform, Qlik Sense, to run alongside it, due to its intuitive, user-friendly dashboards as it will enable the health board to expand data analysis to all members of staff.
Prior to the Qlik implementation, information reporting at Cwm Taf was a particularly cumbersome process, which saw the team faced with trying to manage data from 40 to 50 disparate systems across the organisation. This siloed approach made it extremely difficult to see how efficiencies could be driven across different departments – especially as analysis was mainly carried out by the data performance team, rather than at a user level and as needed, such as by clinicians, who could actually give input based on their day-to-day interactions with patients.
With Qlik Sense being rolled out initially to over 500 users across the health board, doctors will be able to drill down into data sets and create visualisations to help them understand how departments are functioning and therefore identify where operational efficiencies can be made. The health board’s main objective is to achieve a more-holistic view of its data so it can streamline the time in which patients are treated and subsequently reduce patient waiting times.
“Improving patient care is our number one priority and it is therefore critical that we invest in the right technologies to enable this,” says Lloyd Bishop, head of performance and innovation at Cwm Taf University Health Board.
“Qlik Sense will not only provide us with a holistic view of how we’re treating patients, but also allow us to interrogate this data to find what we can improve on to ultimately become more efficient. We’re also excited at the prospect of empowering our clinical team with Qlik Sense to help discover these efficiencies using the platform’s impressive visual capabilities. It’s great to have analysis software that truly anyone can use, not just a data analysis team.”
Qlik Sense has the capability to represent data in a visual format that clinicians can understand and rely on. For example, with a simple scatter graph, we were immediately able to identify where consultants were working with too many patients or taking too long to respond to patient needs. This ability to quickly spot peaks in admissions and re-assign resources accordingly will become invaluable in our driving efficiencies over the next 12 months.
Sean Farrington, Qlik’s UK and Ireland managing director and regional vice president of Northern Europe, said. “The NHS, perhaps more than any other organisation, is under constant pressure to find ways to operate more efficiently while still reducing costs. One of the most-effective ways to do this is for health boards such as Cwm Taf to empower their staff to do their jobs to the best of their ability - simply by making more-effective use of a resource they already have - organisational data. We’re really pleased to see Qlik Sense used to help give the board better insights into the ways they can not only reduce waiting times for patients, but ultimately, help to save lives.”
