Coventry and Warwicks switches to automated reporting

University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust has implemented DataWatch Europe’s Monarch Data Pump – an automated reporting system which can combine and manipulate data into a format that suits the user.

UHCW has the largest new university ‘super’ hospital in Britain and sees one million patients a year with around 30,000 appointments each week.

The trust outsources storage and delivery of patient records to the logistics firm, TNT, and wanted a system that could convert the records from its existing appointments system into a format that could be shared with TNT’s system.

Monarch Data Pump automatically imports, transforms and delivers data mined from report files, PDF files, databases, spreadsheets, OLE (object linking and embedding) database sources and HTML files. It also automatically exports the data to where it is needed, updates rows in a table or delivers data and reports to the appropriate recipients.

UHCW’s chief technology officer, Nick Elliott, said: “They [DataWatch] understood the problem, the urgency; responded flexibly to help us, including coming on site to ensure that the system was up and running on time.”

The trust wanted to ensure that the delivery and return of patient records were as accurate as possible and were did not put a patient in any danger.

Elliott added: “Delays could have meant patients arriving at appointments without the right notes being delivered in time, and this was unacceptable: every day counted.”

A DataWatch spokesperson told E-Health Insider: “Monarch Data Pump was fast to deploy, it is a flexible ETL (Extract, Transfer, Load) tool – UHCW needed it up and running yesterday. It helped them get the right records to the appointments, without needing to change the PAS or making TNT change their software. We were approached in mid-September and had the system deployed and in use within days of the request.”

The way that Monarch works is based on the fact that when any report is produced, it is written to a print or spool file. Monarch reads the print files, extracts the data from them, and then allows the user to combine and manipulate that data into a format that suits them.

The user starts by telling Monarch what information they are interested in within the print files that it is processing. They can then apply filters, sort data, do calculations and so on. This is done without any programming by means of dialogue boxes.

UCHW currently uses the system for sorting its patient appointments list and bed occupancy lists, and are looking at using the system to make more reports easier for staff to understand when TNT deliver them each morning.

The DataWatch spokesperson added: “We FTP (File Transfer Protocol) data to TNT in the format they specified at the right time every day, automatically. It ensures that records are delivered to the right place at the right time and has saved the trust the hassle of developing and supporting an application to convert the data to TNT’s format.

He said the system was automated, so all the trust had to do was set up any reports that needed converting for a set time. It then converts the lists, such as patient appointment lists and bed occupancy lists into a clear legible order for the nurses and clinicians to work with.

Two trust staff members have been trained to adapt the system, should the trust or TNT want changes, such as positions of columns or order of data displayed.

Elliott said: “It’s much better than a programming approach. It makes the system easier to maintain, as models and projects can be altered or developed by non-technical staff, so the process is not dependent on IT resources.

“It allows us to consider other ways of sharing data internally, as well as with other hospitals and with other private sector partners, not only for medical records – but for all situations where data needs to be shared or transformed.”

A DataWatch spokesperson said the system offered a painless, non-invasive means to access and transform output from legacy systems and third party data providers and use it to solve business problems. He added that it would be able to deliver data from any format to any format and so will be useful for converting data when electronic patient records begin to be uploaded onto the Spine.