Business Intelligence Customer Testimonial South Tees

The James Cook University Hospital is a district general hospital for approximately 300,000 people living in Middlesbrough and the local areas of Redcar and Cleveland that is part of the South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust.

The 7,000-strong workforce provides a range of highly specialised services extending to 1.5 million people in Teesside and parts of Cumbria, Durham, and North Yorkshire. These services include cardiology, cancer treatment, renal services, neurology, and neurosurgery. The newest of these services is the North of England Spinal Injuries Centre.

The hospital needed to provide productivity reports to the UK health authorities and looked for help from an outside specialist. The funding of important services depended on the capability to provide such reports. However, the data that was used was unreliable and created only 40% of the needed amount of valid reports.

Agfa's Business Consultants were called in to understand the hospital's needs and objectives and provide recommendations using information mined from the hospital's existing databases.

Strategy:
Understand productivity of the hospital

Objectives:
Implement new reporting solution.

Main Key Performance Indicator (KPI):
Increase data validity from 40% to 75%

Agfa’s KPI Analyses:

  • Identify key database fields that are critical for needed information
  • Validate process to determine if the applied workflow matches the use of the database
  • Investigate the validity of key database fields (content validity)

Advise to Action:

  • Correct list of visits with errors
  • Manually correct data (short term)
  • Train administrators on how to enter data to avoid incorrect data input (long term)

Summary:

Agfa Healthcare Consulting found a way to detect and create the missing reports needed by the hospital. The Trust is now able to deliver reliable figures on radiology production for budget funding. In the past only 40% of the required data for reporting was reliably extracted. As a result of this service, this figure has increased to 95%.