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Highlights
- University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust wanted to incorporate data-driven decision making to enhance patient outcomes, staff experience, and operational efficiency.
- TCS worked with the hospital to address their operational challenges and improve existing systems and processes.
- By collaborating with TCS, the hospital has significantly improved data quality, performance report turnaround times, and compliance with statutory reporting at national and regional levels.
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Overview
University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust is a leading hospital in southern England.
One of the largest hospitals in the United Kingdom, it provides a range of secondary care services to the local population and specialist tertiary services for nearly four million people across the south of England and beyond.
The hospital also offers education and training to medical students, nurses, and other healthcare professionals and is actively involved in researching and developing new treatments and technologies.
As part of its commitment to providing high-quality care, the hospital wanted to make better use of available data to drive decision-making and improve healthcare delivery.
Challenge
The hospital was primarily looking to improve operational efficiencies and regulatory compliance.
The first need was to automate data flow from various systems within the hospital. The second was to meet the strict statutory reporting requirements of the National Health Service (NHS), the publicly funded healthcare system in the United Kingdom, at both regional and national levels.
However, there were several challenges within the reporting function at the hospital, such as meeting the reporting deadlines for the UK’s Single Health Resilience Early Warning Database (SHREWD) metrics, which are used to track critical parameters regarding healthcare services and patient experience.
Other challenges included time-consuming and inefficient manual processes, high volumes of requests for comprehensive reports showcasing operational performance metrics, multiple sources of the same data instead of a single source of truth, compliance with national formats (NHS has a specific format for the reports that they need from hospitals regularly), data quality, and collection issues, and long report production cycles leading to delays.
Solution
The hospital partnered with TCS to address their operational challenges and improve existing systems and processes.
TCS automated data provisioning (extraction, transport, and loading or ETL) processes. TCS implemented its proprietary accelerators for legacy automation, data provisioning, and executive reporting. The goal was to automate ETL processes, including downstream reporting and analytics in Power BI.
To accelerate data retrieval from SHREWD, operational pressures escalation (a framework that provides a unified, systematic, and structured approach to detection and assessment of acute hospital urgent and emergency care operating pressures) levels, and generate other bespoke reports covering over 40 metrics, TCS deployed an accelerator for handling large volumes of data from various systems, both internal and external. The reports provide visibility on the trust’s resilience, including areas of pressure for timely decision making.
These metrics include total admissions, discharges, length of stay, bed occupancy, number of escalations, critical care bed status, nurse-to-patient ratio, ambulance handover breaches, open bed gaps, and outliers.
TCS also delivered comprehensive reports showcasing operational performance metrics, such as workforce management, daily situation reports, outpatient activity, cancellations, and those who did not attend. Finally, TCS supported data governance, self-service data provisioning, and emerging requirements as part of their collaboration with the trust.
Benefits
Collaborating with TCS helped the hospital streamline operations and improve overall efficiency.
The University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust experienced the following benefits:
- Achieved ~85% efficiency gain in report development, which in turn increased operational efficiency through:
- Decrease in report turnaround time (cancellation, absentees, and follow-ups)
- Reduction in data lag (as required data is collected automatically and reports are published)
- Improved data quality by closing gaps and providing visibility on data quality issues
- Received support for the integrated care board in gaining system-wide visibility of resilience and areas of pressure in the delivery of health and social care
- Provided monthly retrospective updates on the workforce to help identify any current or future areas of risk or concern
- Improved decision making with real-time insights and faster response to issues that impact patients and the workforce
- Ensured compliance with statutory reporting at national and regional levels
- Achieved faster system-wide response in confronting and averting pressure during peak times to ensure effective delivery of care, patient flow, and staff satisfaction
- Achieved ~30% reduction in effort to collate data and generate reports
It has been a particularly pressured time for the trust, and the NHS as a whole. The availability of timely, quality data and insight has become more critical now than ever before, to improve patient experience by delivering seamless and timely services and for workforce optimization. When NHS England asked for data to support winter planning and SHREWD metrics, we saw this as an opportunity to improve and enhance our data collection and reporting systems. TCS, with its rich experience in data and analytics space, came across as the right partner to help us while ensuring we meet the extremely tight deadlines.”
