Background
NHS North West London Integrated Care Board (ICB) is dedicated to meeting the healthcare needs of over 2.1 million people across eight boroughs in North West London. Responsible for managing the NHS budget and ensuring the provision of diverse health services, NHS NW London ICB faced the challenge of optimising care delivery amidst complex data sets and diverse healthcare needs.
The Challenge
NHS NW London ICB identified a critical need for a centralised, comprehensive tool to better understand the population of asthma patients and key factors affecting asthma care decisions across the region. Clinicians and service leads lacked insights into population health, clinical treatment, financial impact, and wider determinants of asthmatic health. The goal was to leverage existing data to drive transformative improvements in patient care and operational efficiency.
The Solution
London Asthma Decision Support (LADS) Tool
To address these challenges, Vizify Analytics collaborated with NHS North West London ICB to develop the highly commended London Asthma Decision Support (LADS) tool. This ground-breaking data visualisation solution integrates air pollution, demographic, and social deprivation data with routinely collected NHS data to provide actionable insights for early intervention and improved outcomes. The solution was developed in Tableau, utilising SQL data pipelines to manage and process the data.
Key aspects assessed by the LADS tool
- Population health insights
Asthmatic population trends over time, demographics (age, gender, ethnicity), co-morbidities, and clinical interactions. - Clinical treatment analysis:
Delivery methods, diagnostics, prescriptions, and patient monitoring. - Financial impact assessment:
Costs associated with primary care, acute care, prescriptions, and hospital stays. - Wider determinants of health:
Environmental and socio-economic factors such as smoking status, BMI, and social deprivation.
Our Approach
- Discovery: Engaging with clinicians and service leads to understand requirements and co-create dashboard wireframes.
- Accelerated delivery: Parallel development of SQL data pipelines and Tableau dashboards by two simultaneous teams.
- User acceptance testing: Iterative testing by internal and clinical teams.
- Security implementation: Ensuring data security and user access control through identity-based filters in Tableau.
- Deployment: Publishing dashboards to Tableau Server with comprehensive documentation.
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Results & Recognition
The LADS tool enabled clinical teams to intervene earlier in the patient pathway, improving outcomes and focusing on health equity. It provided a geospatial view of asthma metrics, enhancing data-driven decision-making at various levels (Health Borough, Primary Care Network, and GP Practice).
The tool’s impact was recognised with a highly commended achievement in the Data-Driven Transformation Award at the 2023 HSJ Awards, highlighting its excellence in healthcare data visualisation.
Kavitha Saravanakumar,NHS North-West London , Director of Business Intelligence
Get in touch to book a Unify demo, or speak to a Vizify Consultant about your data challenge:
max.kenney@vizify.co.uk | tim.archer@vizify.co.uk | hello@vizify.co.uk | 0208 050 3635
