Black Country Healthcare - Synapse Analytics based BI Solution

Client: Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Industry: Healthcare/NHS
Project Location: Dudley and Wolverhampton
What we did: Designed and built Trust-wide Synapse Analytics based BI Solution 

Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provides specialist mental health, learning disability, and community healthcare services for the population of the Black Country within the Metropolitan Boroughs of Wolverhampton, Sandwell, Dudley and Walsall which together have a population in excess of 1.4 million people. 

Reason for change

The Trust had a desire to improve the clinical and management analytics and reporting that is made available to both Clinicians and Managers throughout the Trust. To this end, the Trust wanted to ascertain the reports and analyses that the key departments within the organisation actually desired themselves. The Trust felt that this “bottom-up style” of deriving the analytics strategy for the Trust would foster more use and engagement with management information and push the Trust towards their goal of being a data driven organisation.

The Vision 

The vision is, of course, to continually improve the quality of service provision. To support this, the Trust wants to learn from the myriad of data assets available within the organisation. As with most large organisations, more and more data is being collected each day by the Trust. Exposing this data in an easy to use and understandable format to all key decision makers within the organisation was seen as key to progress. Also key is that the recipients themselves prescribe the analyses of data they need to better manage their departments and provision of care services.

The Solution

Village Software had already worked with the Trust to ascertain the Trust’s “Analytics Strategy and associated solution architecture” – in essence the first phase of this overall project. Village were then engaged to deliver the actual solution design and build. Village utilised the MS Synapse analytics environment to deliver a Cloud based system that includes Pipelines for ETL, the Synapse data Warehouse and MS PowerBi for reporting and analytics. The solution integrates data from four key Trust source systems, Rio Electronic Patient Record, ESR and Allocate Optima (Health Roster) HR and workforce management systems and Ulysses, the Trust’s incident and governance management solution. Integrating this varied and sophisticated data provides the Trust with a rich reporting and analyses capability that covers all aspects of patient care, clinical outcomes and resource management. 

The Benefits

Providing good reporting and analytics for any NHS Provider Organisation is both difficult and essential. As a large Mental Health Provider, Black Country want to continually improve the quality of their patient services and to this end, wanted to learn from it’s own data. In particular they wanted to analyse the impact of differing staff levels, staff types (Agency, substantive, Bank) on patient outcomes. A particular benefit of the solution is that it analyses the staff acuity and staff training compliance at ward level per shift. This allows a correlation to incidents on the ward and ascertains the impact of resourcing and resource types to improve staff safety and patient care. Coupled with extensive analytics of waiting times, urgent care clinical activity and HR data, the solution gives widespread benefits to the Trust’s managers, clinicians and executives.

"The Trust worked very closely and extremely well with named consultants from Village Software. Together we have delivered a far-reaching solution that provides the decision making information benefits that the clinicians and managers themselves requested. The Synapse Analytics based solution stack including MS PowerBi proved to be the ideal solution environment”

- Hywel Morris, Trust Head of Business Intelligence

About Village
Village Software Engineering design and build incredible software solutions with the single aim of improving your Organisation.

Our specialists at Village Software will work with you to help identify the actual problems your organisation needs to address which involves speaking to users and stakeholders across the Enterprise. We will then work with you to develop an innovative software solution that truly delivers the requirements gleaned from the organisation’s user community. Our aim is to ensure our solutions and systems substantively help you to achieve your wider business objectives. 

 Feel free to get in touch for an exploratory conversation and some initial advice.