Case Study: NHS Data Dashboard

Join Dr. Rachel Sutherland, a consultant in acute medicine specialising in same-day emergency care, as she shares the story behind the development of a data-driven dashboard for the Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) unit at Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital. Dr. Sutherland discusses how they tackled the challenge of capturing and presenting data while ensuring patient privacy and complying with GDPR regulations, in collaboration with the Scottish Tech Army (STA). The prototype dashboard provides essential clinical information for individual days, comparing it to daily averages and highlighting patient outcomes. Discover the real-time insights the dashboard offers, empowering healthcare professionals to make impactful decisions. Dr. Sutherland also reflects on the enriching experience of collaborating with STA professionals, their dedication, and the positive impact it had during a challenging time in the pandemic.

View the transcript below:

Dr Rachel Sutherland

Hi, I'm Dr. Rachel Sutherland. I'm a consultant in acute medicine and I specialise in same day emergency care. So, the problem - SDEC or same day emergency care as a brand new unit began in November 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, but we had this amazing opportunity to start to look at our data and capture data as the service began. But how are we going to do that, and that was sort of my first question was essentially developing a rather simplistic dashboard, just about the data that we already had in our system. And that's what I came to the Scottish Tech Army with.

0:48 Neil McCallum

My background is I'm a IT consultant. Originally, a programmer moved into the business analysis and project management world. I was between contracts and at a bit of a loose end. And I found the STA looked interesting, bit of work for my spare time I've got plenty of time, that might be something that I could, that could enhance my current skills. Specifically, I was looking for data type roles. And I was lucky enough to pick one up at the STA because I've recently completed a data analysis course at CodeClan. So it's really good to maybe just use that, skills that learning from CodeClan in STA.

The enjoyment I got working with the NHS was the two of us working together for very limited requirements, and just building up that picture.

One of the great challenges was actually identifying the data items required for the dashboard presentation. Obviously, it's very private data, medical data, of course, GDPR, it was actually sourcing that data, and understanding the data relationships.

So here is the same day emergency care prototype dashboard, the main piece of work and the time consuming piece was actually this and defining all these columns defining this data was the bulk of the work, it's very time consuming. But once we had done that, we could then define here, what sort of information that the client wants to see. So for this initial prototype, all that our client wanted to see was to display clinical information by individual day only. So we have a drop box here where you can select specific days to show that information.

What we have it's very, very simple information. For example, here we have new patient appointments for that particular day selected versus the daily average. We've got returned patients for particular day versus a daily average. So a lot of this information is comparing today's information with what we would expect to see over an average. So we have the top half here we have patients in or admitted to SDEC. And the bottom half here we have outcomes, very brief outcomes at the moment. And this is all the client wanted to see outcomes for the day, based on this grouping, you can see here, okay, so what we see at the top of the screen here or in the screen here is information and numbers for those patients seen or admitted to the SDEC. While at the bottom of the screen here, we see outcomes. Outcomes for group as can be seen on the list here, very limited outcome information, but at the moment, that was all the NHS required.

So my final meeting with the NHS data analysts, they did stress and they were very grateful for the work that we did in identifying that data. I think it saved them a lot of time for them now to take that data forward and create a more formal interactive dashboard eventually.

4:28 Dr Rachel Sutherland

As we started to reach out and communicate about the dashboard we were developing for SDEC it became clear that a lot of the work was new and it was transferable to other areas. So what we then do is we publish that into conferences so that other like minded people and other services can share that learning that I developed with Neil. So we published the project in the society of acute medicines international conference. We did that in poster format, we also did a number of presentations. So we presented to the NHS digital sharing forum for SDECs. And we went to meet the NHS clinical lead for SDECs called Tara Sood, who is down in London in the Royal Free Hospital. And through that, our learning our shared learning with me and Neil, and what we can do the art of the possible was enabled to be shared with other units across the country.

It brought our project forward by a minimum of six months, but probably a year, we would not have a functioning dashboard without the input of Neil and the work that we did together anytime soon. And then what that means for patients is that we have a real time view of what is happening within our department. So unfortunately, a lot of informatics information surrounding medicine is always done retrospectively. So what this dashboard gives us is real time data and the power that we are just seeing on a daily basis.

So I'll give you an example of that. So we recently changed our process so that we introduced a triage bay. And what the dashboard was able to show us is that on average, every single patient, it reduced the time within SDEC by 20 minutes, which is a really significant amount of time. And knowing our own patient feedback, we know that time in department is a real bugbear. So being able to display that in real time was just really, really powerful.

I think one of the really important outcomes from this project for me as a professional was my interaction with the professionals of the Scottish Tech Army, the main one being Neil, but I also have to mention Victoria as well. And actually having that contact with professionals that work within separate organisations enables you to raise your eyes. They were obviously donating their time, but they were so enthusiastic. And that was really helpful during a time in the pandemic that was really grungy for us here in the NHS, to know people that were invested and were wanting to give us something back was just so empowering. So that was really, really important.

But also, the conversations that I had with Neil in terms of data and in terms of data development was just really enriching for me as a professional and as a person. And it helped me understand how to communicate and develop interactions with professionals that have a skill set that I need to connect with and how to get the best out of one another. And it was just a really positive and informative experience.