Black Country Healthcare

Client: Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Industry: Healthcare/NHS
Project Location: Dudley and Wolverhampton
What we did: Develop the Trust’s Analytics Strategy and Solution Design/Architecture

Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust are a leading Provider of Mental Health Services in England. Their Services cover the towns 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

Following a tendering process, the Trust appointed Village Software consultancy services to develop the Analytics Strategy and the solution design and architecture to deliver the analyses and reporting to meet the requirements prescribed by both the Corporate and Clinical Units of the Trust.

Village Software utilised their “Blueprint” methodology to ascertain the reporting requirements from the Trust’s eight key “Business Units”. This included the provision of workshops for each unit designed to glean the user audience, data sources, chosen analytics and visualisation styles, as well as the required data integration and “business rules” to deliver the defined outputs. By understanding the full requirements emanating from these workshops, Village Software also designed the Solution Architecture that would best deliver the chosen results.

The Benefits

By using the Village Software Blueprint Methodology, the Trust benefitted from exceptionally good staff engagement in the process across all the chosen Business Units. Both Management and Clinical Staff now feel that “they will get exactly what they want and need” by way of analyses and reporting. The benefit in decision making will therefore be quite demonstrable. The solution designed by Village Software utilises the full power of the Microsoft Azure-Synapse Analytics environment, which offers the Trust exceptional flexibility for growth, a Cloud/on-premise hybrid architecture, a powerful business intelligence data warehouse and extremely user-friendly analysis and reporting.

"Working with the Consultants from Village Software and using their Blueprint Methodology really did engage our Managers and Clinicians in helping us to develop a powerful analytics strategy and Azure-based solution architecture."

- 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 business.

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 business. We will then work with you to develop a technology roadmap which is designed around solving your problems and achieving your wider business objectives.

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