Background
NHS North West London Integrated Care Board (ICB) spans 8 boroughs, managing an annual budget of approximately £4 billion to provide healthcare for over 2 million people. Their four primary goals are to:
- Improve population health and healthcare outcomes.
- Prevent ill health and tackle inequalities in outcomes, experience, and access.
- Enhance productivity and value for money.
- Support broader economic and social development.
NHS NWL’s Data Goals and Objectives
Improving healthcare outcomes starts with a comprehensive understanding of patient data.
At the outset of their journey, NHS NWL partnered with Vizify Analytics to leverage integrated information, cutting-edge technology, and advanced analytics. Their goal was to enhance health and social care outcomes in North West London. The pivotal first step was integrating data across siloed systems to create a unified patient view, igniting this transformative data journey.
The Data Integration Story
The Challenges
- Siloed data: Data was stored in separate systems across hundreds of environments, including 250 GPs, 4 Acute Trusts, 4 Community Trusts, 2 Mental Health Trusts, in 8 local boroughs. This made it impossible to get a holistic view of a patient’s journey across all healthcare services.
- Inefficient manual data integration: Building data pipelines for data with up to 300 columns from various sources was a laborious and error-prone process, consuming valuable time and resources. In-house expertise needed to maintain the manual integration process was costly and inefficient.
The WSIC Solution
First, the Whole System Integrated Care (WSIC) data ecosystem was established to develop an automated and scalable ‘single source of truth’ for integrated care records. This solution was designed for direct care, case finding, population health management, as well as public health analysis and research.
Kavitha Saravanakumar, NHS North-West London, Director of Business Intelligence
Kavitha Saravanakumar, NHS North-West London, Director of Business Intelligence
Our Solution Delivery
Vizify Analytics has spearheaded an extraordinary data transformation journey with NHS NWL, meticulously delivering the WSIC solution. This endeavour began with the creation of a data warehousing framework, which serves as a foundation for a centralised data warehouse to bring together all siloed data across various systems. This ground-breaking solution empowered NHS NWL to make strategic, informed decisions while upholding the highest standards of data governance.
The data warehouse solution involved three analytics layers:
- Data layer: Cleaned and integrated raw data from multiple systems.
- Analytics layer: Enriched data with derived columns, calculations, and flags, including QOF calculations, risk scores, data quality suggestions, and care plan tracking.
- Reporting layer: Built tables for reporting, aggregating data to meet various reporting needs.
The dashboards created were used by direct care users, key decision-makers in population health, as well as analysts and researchers for a variety of use cases:
- Case-finding tools: Identifying individual patients needing proactive intervention.
- Case management: Tracking patient history and care plans.
- MDT meetings: Providing summary information for multidisciplinary team meetings, focusing the care to patients that need it the most.
- Benchmarking and research: Unlocking opportunities for benchmarking and research with aggregated, anonymised data.
Our Differentiated Approach
- Automated data integration: We developed scripts to automate the integration of complex data tables using metadata-driven warehousing. This approach significantly reduced manual labour and errors, saved deployment time, and ensured consistent data handling.
- Scalable architecture: Our data warehouse architecture captures data from over 20 systems. Initially built on on-premise SQL servers, we migrated to Azure in 2019 and are currently re-engineering to use Snowflake.
- Democratised data access: We empowered non-technical users to participate in the data integration process, reducing dependency on specialised staff and fostering collaboration.
- Enhanced data quality: We enabled daily data refreshes, improving data quality and ensuring up-to-date dashboards. Configurable data health checks are performed on each data load, preventing poor data from reaching the final dashboards.
- Highest standards of data governance: We implemented robust user access control, opt-out management, and row-level security models. Additionally, we created a pseudonymised data warehouse for research purposes. Configurable data health checks on each load allow for thorough auditing, further enhancing data quality.
Results
Kavitha Saravanakumar,NHS North-West London , Director of Business Intelligence
Kavitha Saravanakumar,NHS North-West London , Director of Business Intelligence
Key Takeaways
Our collaboration with NHS NWL has spanned over 10 years, demonstrating a strong relationship. We have been with them in every step of their journey. Latest enhancements include faster data querying with Snowflake, allowing real-time dashboard connectivity.
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
