St George’s develops BI analytics portal

St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust is developing a bespoke portal to share interactive reports and dashboards produced by its Tableau visual analytics solution across the organisation.

The trust is also expanding the number of licences it has to allow staff to produce their own analysis.

Tom Dewar, the trust’s head of information, told EHI he started work to select a single business intelligence system for the trust shortly after starting his role 18 months ago.

“We had a range of systems in place, but we didn’t have a key system or put our support behind anything.”

Dewar said the trust chose Tableau because it could produce interactive reports and dashboards in an automated, interactive and timely manner, allowing the information team to widen the scope of its data analysis.

“Our aim is to answer general questions, not just the specific ones. If someone in a specialty wants to see how outpatient appointments are trending over time, then we should be able to answer that for them, but also for the other specialties.”

He said the software is “particularly quick” and can easily produce summaries with a small enough data set.

“If you’ve got a question about data, you can point it at the data source, be playing with the data very quickly and deliver an output that’s more than good enough to chuck into an email and send to somebody.”

Dewar said the trust trialled Tableau in 2013 before buying five desktop licences and a server version of the software. It distributed reports and content through the trust’s intranet to its 8,000 employees so the information could be accessed without a separate log-in.

The trust is focussed on creating constantly updated but standardised data sets to make it easier to respond to queries, he said.

The software is primarily being used for decision support and analysing activity, such as waiting times and average lengths of stays, helping the trust to understand whether different events are connected.

The trust can also see who is viewing and accessing the reports so they have a better understanding of what information is relevant to staff.

“At the moment there are lots of reports and Excel spreadsheets going out and being put on a shared drive, but we have no idea whether they’re still being used and most of them probably aren’t.”

Dewar said the trust is planning to increase the number of people who can produce their reports so clinicians and other staff can use their knowledge to make queries and produce reports.

The trust is also planning to develop a “slightly more bespoke version” of the Tableau portal to sit on users’ desktops and provide easy access to reports and dashboards.

“When you go there, it will look like the app store with favourites and recommended reports – we need to look at how we disseminate the information across the organisation.”

Dewar said data analytics will be an important part of the trust’s new information strategy, which is being completed for internal feedback by the end of the month.