South West Essex buys BI from 21c

NHS South West Essex Community Services has implemented business intelligence solutions from specialist 21c to help it deliver its 18 week patient pathway and performance scorecard.

The trust said deployment of the Microsoft-based BI solutions had improved the efficiency, cost and accuracy of its reporting.

It said the pilot phase, covering six of the 50 community services in south west Essex, had reduced the query times for the 18 week pathway from three working days to five minutes.

Julie Price, head of performance and business development at NHS South West Essex Community Services, said the level of human resource required to report against just six of its services had proved challenging. “To scale that manual process across all 50 was simply not viable,” she added.

Price said the trust used TPP’s SystmOne for patient data, but had opted to use 21c for reporting after seeing a demonstration of its document management systems and its potential to report and create dashboards by amalgamating data warehouse feeds from the trust’s numerous systems.

Price added: “Now we are working with dynamic information instead of data that’s a month out of date, which has empowered us to work proactively rather than reactively.”

Paul Henderson, 21c’s managing director, said many NHS organisations were wrestling to analyse data held in lots of different systems.

He added: “Breaking down these information silos and getting systems such as those for finance, HR and clinical operations to talk to each other is critical to not only the delivery of good patient care but to accurate, useful and timely business intelligence.”