Getting more from your warehouse
How should NHS trusts and organisations best approach opening their data warehouses to local service providers and for managing Payment by Results and Practice-Based Commissioning? Ardentia looks at the issues.
A warehouse is only as useful as the goods that it stores – and that’s especially true with NHS data warehouses. A trust’s data warehouse holds the raw material for the organisation to report on and analyse all aspects of regional and local healthcare delivery – the patient activity data, which has to be actively managed and collated ready for use in a number of ways.
Acute trusts and other NHS organisations have to prepare their patient data ready for seamless transfer to local service providers (LSPs), to build joined-up electronic patient records. And as primary care trusts (PCTs) continue to develop localised Payment by Results (PbR) and Practice-Based Commissioning (PBR) processes, they need to efficiently manage highly complex data sets on tens of thousands of patients, while giving a framework that lets clinicians and analysts review treatment data down to identifiable patient level.
For all NHS organisations, achieving the desired balance of macro-level data management with micro-detailed analytical capabilities is not easy. There’s plenty of advice and resource material available from a number of bodies – but reading it all is a perfect recipe for a headache.
However, this checklist of key points to observe in preparing data warehouses for the demands of the patient-focused NHS – drawn from direct development experiences with trusts across the UK – offers practical advice which can help soothe that data headache.
Loading bay
Does your data warehouse have an efficient method of loading and managing data from the multiple systems your organisation touches – including other systems within the trust, GP practices and other related healthcare bodies? Solutions such as Ardentia Warehouse Manager can link into any data source, providing data validation, cleansing and publishing facilities and giving control over what data is loaded and made available for reporting. Validation and updates should be done separately from the main warehouse in a “staging” database, and data only transferred to the main database after validation and approval.
Data matters
While ensuring that as much relevant data as possible can be uploaded to the warehouse, another challenge faced by NHS organisations is the mapping of raw patient data into data types and record units, so be prepared for some work in this area. Consulting with peers in early-adopter NHS organisations can help, as can working with a software supplier with a strong track record in data migration.
Reporting in depth
A range of users – from healthcare and locality managers, to clinicians and GPs, need access to the warehouse to analyse data and generate reports. If data warehouse reporting tools with a range of predefined analyses and automated reports are available, as with Ardentia solution modules, users can drill into data for detailed analysis according to their access authorisation.
Reporting can be delivered using a web browser-based approach, giving easy, intuitive and secure access to the data warehouse to all that need it – whether locally or via NHSnet. With predefined reporting, different users can also interrogate the overall data warehouse in detail, without having to ask for IT support in producing reports. In turn, this gives decision-makers a clearer and more accessible picture of what they need to know.
The points covered here will help trusts build open, accessible warehouses, leading to more proactive, patient-centric healthcare management in line with best clinical practice.
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