Business Intelligence (BI) is a hugely useful way of analysing data to discover ways of improving business performance. Using web-based BI the NHS is reaping benefits too.
Modernisation in the NHS is a slow and complex task. Quite apart from all the cultural, political and economic issues involved, there is the struggle with the best way to deal with legacy data and information the NHS has built up in its long history. Data complexities faced by BI include the vast difference in formats between clinical data and managerial data.
There are issues around the varied collection of IT systems and arrangements the NHS deals with, the National programme for IT being the latest, and in addition some data is not even held by the NHS but is the property of affiliated institutions, Royal Colleges or other professional bodies for example. Finally, many NHS systems are still using green-screen, client/server technology, which is not connected to the internet, and as a result are isolated 'islands of information'.
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BI can start unlocking the hidden value in NHS information and start providing clinicians, administrators and commissioners much more powerful ways of seeing the bigger picture in their organisations or networks. BI could, for instance, facilitate benchmarking around incidence, mortality, quality performance measures and access targets for different disease areas, among other factors, in a way that is accessible and aggregated on a single website.
The Cancer Commissioning Toolkit (CCT) is a web-based BI tool that is providing an online, national view of responses and actions to cancer. The main impetus behind the CCT was the need to help cancer networks and primary care trusts commission cancer services more effectively, addressing the government's vision for ‘World Class Commissioning' (Commissioning is the NHS term for planning and purchasing healthcare).
CCT is a one stop library of cancer information and data, and has been hailed as "a major step forward" by the government Cancer Tsar Mike Richards. The toolkit presents data in a way stake-holders can understand - and data can still be made available remotely to relevant stake-holders despite not being physically contained in some proprietary NHS database.
CCT also points to the way lots of key information resources can be easily grouped and accessed, via portals that can, when used effectively, transform the way the NHS can deliver information, driving management information to individual user desktops where it can easily be integrated with familiar Microsoft Office tools such as Word and Excel. As stake-holders already use these tools, the integration and deployment overheads are radically small. As a result, processes and decisions are much more transparent to stake-holders from different sectors.
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