Our line-up of three fantastic speakers:
- Mike Farrar, former CEO of NHS Confederation
- Mark Austin, Senior Informatics Officer at Manchester University Hospital NHSFT
- Ceri Dallimore, Digital Nursing Principal Analyst at Cardiff & Vale UHB
We held our first Spotlight on Quality Webinar for 2024 in January, on the topic of Data and Triangulation.
Here is our short take on all the highlights:
This webinar focused on how healthcare organisations tackled data at scale, shifting the mindset to focus on meeting key challenges using different types of complimentary data.
Let’s start off thinking about data and intelligence and how it's utilised.
Only through strong intelligence will healthcare organisations be able tackle the ever-increasing demand for its services. Through the informed use of resources, backed by data-led intelligence, healthcare pathways and processes can be reshaped to best meet changes in the nature and amount of demand.
There is one question that many NHS leadership, Chief Executives and Chairs discuss: ‘how much truth does digitise data hold?’. What they come to find is that data is often imprecise, eroding its perceived usefulness. So how do we change this perception?
Data at differing levels.
It is well known that data requirements are different at each level of an organisation. From a prevention and early intervention lens, Mike talked about a study in northern Spain where data was used to track the number of times that individuals go to the loo in the middle of the night. In a biomedical sense you can begin to predict patterns and interactions, which allows us to prevent and effectively avoid infections, delirium and falls.
And with this evidence alone, organisations can better inform individuals about their health. This study found that they can add an extra 2.2 years of independent life for those individuals for whom that service is available. So, information rich data allows us to move into a more personalised, predictive space if utilised correctly.
At Cardiff and Vale there are different audiences even within nursing itself that require input and interaction with data. These could be ward specific challenges, supporting overarching quality initiatives, or patient experience triangulation to name a few.
A focus on challenging perceptions of data across the nursing populus is paramount to Ceri’s success within her role as Cardiff & Vale’s Digital Nursing Principal Analyst, the key to meeting this challenge is to be information rich as opposed to just data rich. This allows colleagues to act off insight, as opposed to understanding what has happened in the past.
Underpinning strong insight is the importance of engaging front-line staff and to encourage them to record data routinely. The second part of the struggle is to find and decode comparable data sets into a common format to start triangulation with other data sets. Although resource intensive, this is what separates a detailed dashboard with useful insights to act upon.
How do we use data at an organisational level?
The moment you start to spot a variability in your organisation’s data at a ward-by-ward level, a practice by practice, or even around the individual clinician by individual clinician, this should drive an open conversation. Is this warranted variation? And if it's an unwarranted variation, what can we do about it?
By asking these questions, this conversation can shape the care we will give, as that data on organisational level allows us to start predicting patterns of care and utilization of resources
One thing people don’t talk enough about is partnership – we often hear that the issues lie in how people behave. We find teams by default behave in a very siloed way around their organisation and that's because they're only looking at their system through the lens of the data that they have everyday access to about their organisation.
It's only when you start to triangulate data sets that you start to get an understanding of the system as a whole, and where the system weaknesses. This gives you license to affect positive change.
In my role, there are a different set of challenges. In terms of data, as more organisations are becoming digital. This means that collecting data accurately is easier and efficient. It is also paramount to triangulate and view how you compare with your peers and even other organisations, in order to grow and learn. NHS England statistics is extremely aggregated up to the trust level but is it fair to compare a trust with 10 hospitals to a small district General Hospital? So we must work past the organisational boundaries and look at your system as a whole. We're amazing at achieving red, green, amber, and blue but you need to look at the trends your data is producing to ensure a uniformity of performance. This allows your organisation to understand where you and your team are in real-time and what actions need to be taken.
In conclusion
To conclude, the burning question for most organisations is, how do you create this culture of learning around data and generating insight positively within our organisations?
The answer is you need to start somewhere, by building limited scope actionable insights from what is to hand and build a culture of data-based decision making. Once this first phase is complete, front-line staff engagement is next in the journey to supply accurate, rich data to make informed decisions from.
When achieving data-led insights, 80% of the effort is that last 20% of perfection but ask yourself, do you need the perfect chart? Or are you prioritising the accuracy, and the wealth of the data to ensure that the data is generating insights that will elevate your quality improvement journey.
Tendable as a solution can support you and your organisation, whether it is partnering you with other organisations for you to share best practices, or diving into your data and tracking your trends to maintain consistency in your quality journey.
To watch the full webinar:
