Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust Ward and Community has designed a dashboard to provide access to consolidated integrated data in a timely, accurate and secure manner.
It allows users to retrieve information via standard reporting, self-service query or a data interface and the dashboards provide business units with live information and analyses required to meet objectives.
As part of the project the Trust aimed:
- To deliver trusted data analysis efficiently, including advice on the best data to use;
- To acquire and take full advantage of Trust information, to provide high quality strategic advice to decision makers who use our data;
- To reduce volume of “stand alone” reports from multiple corporate functions to service leads;
- To raise the quality of the data in our business systems;
- Use the most up to date data, analytical techniques, and appropriate technologies.
The Trust told us the main issues to be solved were service managers and staff would receive multiple operational reports from multiple teams including finance, HR, performance and the information could be out of date by the time reports are received. They also said there was a lack of analysis of across multiple reports due to the complexities of doing this, and limited end user knowledge or how to do it.
The Business Support and Improvement team at the Trust worked with front line services to develop more useful and user friendly performance reporting. Performance dashboards for both community and ward based services were initially set up using excel. These included pivots and splitters to help the end users break down the reports to be useful to them. Previously they had received large flat file data. As the dashboards grew additional data sources were added, including HR data for staffing and training compliance, finance data around budgets and cost improvements, quality data including risks and serious incidents. To enable this to be automated and as live as possible, each data provider uploads their information onto a shared Connect site and each ward or community dashboard is linked to this site. When excel is opened you click the refresh button and via power pivot the most up-to-date information is available to the end user.
The Trust has seen a reduction in stand-alone reports and now has easy and quick access to live data in one place.
