Tower Hamlets PCT cuts down PBC reporting times

Data mining software has cut down the length of time that one PCT needs to prepare PBC reports from two days to under an hour.

Tower Hamlets PCT installed the Monarch system in order to go through their reports and pull out the necessary data from 38 practices, such as outpatient appointments, non-elective admissions and consultant-to-consultant referrals.

The software goes through the 62,000 row Excel spreadsheet and automatically sorts it by practice. When the practice started doing this manually at the beginning of the year, it took two days to cut and paste manually.

Carol McGuinness, senior IT analyst at the trust, said: "It is so easy to do now. Datawatch Europe’s trainer built an automated data-extraction process, so we were able to get started straight away, and trained us so we can change the reports or process whenever we need."

In March this year, the DH began supplying its own tools to sort through data for PBC reports, upgrading it in May. While the DH recommends the use of its own software, if there is locally-procured software that also meet the requirements then the deployment is optional. Tower Hamlets PCT says it will continue to use Monarch instead of the DH solution.