University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, CareFlow Medicines Management and ChristianSteven presented a one-off special HTN Now session on ‘Using Business Intelligent (BI) tools for monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)’.
The live lunchtime webcast was delivered on 22 February 2022 and focused on showcasing the Intellifront BI solution – which provides pharmacists with real-time medications data – and how it is possible to leverage better patient outcomes through the power of intelligent data.
If you missed the presentation, you can catch up now through the review or the video recording below.
Delivering this latest webcast on utilising intelligent data was: Helen Ofori-Boateng, Partner Manager with ChristianSteven; Paul Pillai, EPMA System Manager for University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust; Sandra Hamilton, Specialist Pharmacy Technician at University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust.
Paul kicked off the presentation by explaining how the South East trust has used Intellifront to improve patient safety and unlock the potential of data through dashboards.
“We have almost seven years’ worth of prescribing and administration data hidden on our system. The main reason we wanted an analytics and intelligence tool, is to improve patient safety by unlocking the hidden EPMA [Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration] data…with dashboards to show the clinical leaders where incidents are occurring, as well as showing where efficiencies can be made. We are currently in the process of building dashboards and validating them with the safety aspect in mind,” he said.
On the process for implementation, Paul also highlighted how they presented a business case to the trust, which focused on safety and was approved in mid-2019, soon after which they had their server built for the application.
“We were on of the early adopters of the system, so we had our training on the basic aspects like building the datasets, dashboards, and creating users,” he added. “To build most of these dashboards you will need some level of skill and knowledge. Most of ours is self-directed learning.”
On how they developed their system, Paul continued: “We had the custom-built dashboards, that came with the system, which helped us build our own dashboards after that…we started with simple dashboards, often using existing reports…we tested the system with those and they proved to be popular, even though they were simple and basic.
“Soon after that, we started building dashboards that were useful for the teams – one of those is the clinical pharmacist verification dashboard, where it shows the number of prescriptions that have been verified or unverified within a ward. We then had a seven-day project, where we had to create multiple dashboards…the dashboards that we managed to create were really good quality.”
Sandra then stepped in to provide another perspective on the Sussex case study and showcased a number of dashboard examples to the audience, delving into how they can be utilised and how users can drill down into ward-level data, even across different days of the week.
“I’m going to go into a little bit about what we use Intellifront for….and then what we’re planning to do with it in the future,” she stated, highlighting that a specific pharmacy project had helped the trust to develop their approach. “It was to assess our out-of-hours service and to see if there were any gaps in the service and if we needed to amend our opening hours for the pharmacy service – we were asked to provide the data to management for this analysis.”
The team supplied inpatient and takeaway prescriptions information, as well as verification data and dispensary times, and created dashboards for each report, so that management could analyse them easily.
Sandra went on to display several examples and guide the audience through how to use the dashboards, before explaining that – aside from the project – there was daily use of the pharmacist verification dashboard, as well as regular use of a number of other creations.
On what’s next for Sussex’s system, Sandra said: “We are focusing now mainly on clinical dashboards, which are going to help clinical pharmacists and ward staff, as well. In development at the moment, we’ve got various reports – one of which is a meds rec details report, which pharmacists will be able to directly use to compare with what’s described on the chart. The data from that is pulled from the EPMA, and we’ve also got a warfarin report which is pretty much ready to use now, one showing drugs not listed that are prescribed, and an insulin dashboard in early development.”
On the benefits of using the Intellifront solution, Sandra summed up by highlighting the visual display of KPIs for business cases, the ability to monitor performance against CQUIN guidance [The Commissioning for Quality and Innovation framework], control of the reports and refresh rates without input from IT, as well as user access control, including secure multi-user access, the transfer of some responsibility back to clinical teams, the ability to view specific data by wards, and more.
“The overarching benefit of Intellifront – that’s to improve patient safety and, as Paul always likes to say, ‘data saves lives’,” she concluded.
It was then Helen’s turn to take over the webcast to provide an in-depth looks through what the solution can achieve, which she displayed through a demo of the Intellifront system – taking viewers on a journey of how to add or create a new dashboard, utilising a range of visuals such as how to represent data in different ways, while looking at charts, colour schemes, true maps and how to export your information.
Helen said: “A couple of years ago, we came up with Intellifront and this really allows each individual user, clinician and pharmacy tech to get that data, as and when they want to. We are really empowering the consumers of dashboards to access information from Intellifront…there is no limit to the amount of users you can have, there’s no limit to the amount of dashboards or KPIs.
“Every user can be set up under a group or as an individual user – and each user has the ability to set up their own canvas…what that allows them to do is pick and choose the KPIs and the dashboards that are important for them. Immediately, when they log in, those are the dashboards that they will see and are met with, so they don’t have to go searching.”
To view Helen’s demo and the session in full, watch the video below:
