NHS Central Lancashire

NHS Central Lancashire are part of the larger North West NHS region. As a healthcare commissioning organisation, they serve a population of over 460,000 people and employ over 3000 staff.
Many aspects of NHS performance are required to be reported on for comparative purposes and a large element of this information is made available to the general public. This helps to motivate healthcare organisations to improve performance and standards across many indicators. Healthcare organisations like NHS Central Lancashire also have internal KPIs that are not reported to the public and which focus on local areas of interest.

Historically much data within NHS Central Lancashire has been stored and analysed in traditional office systems using products like Microsoft Excel/Access and collating this has been time consuming. In order to improve the process of storing, analysing, and reporting to a wider audience, the IM&T services within the PCT have introduced new technology to help streamline these processes. Data from secondary and community care settings are now stored in the PCT data warehouse using Microsoft SQL Server. The PCT is committed to the implementation of Microsoft SharePoint technology to improve access to information through portals and dashboards. More extensive plans are being developed to introduce SharePoint in other areas to improve workflow and document management.

Head of Information at the PCT, Len Rigby says “We are developing a simple model that allows efficient data processing with the ability to output effectively within SharePoint portals and dashboards using a limited but proven number of reporting methods”.

One of the reporting methods deployed within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 uses the Business Data Catalog (BDC) component which allows interaction between the SQL Server data and the “front end” dashboards and KPIs.

The Information team decided to utilize BDC Meta Man and the Lightning Tools KPI web part to make the integration work much easier and the dashboards come alive with self updating KPIs based on the underlying SQL data.

“We had considered other options however we went down the Lightning Tools route because the company has been very responsive to our requirements and the product is simple to use.”

The Benefits

With the KPI web part, making use of BDC Meta Man and Business Data Catalog, NHS Central Lancashire will be able to perform key reporting tasks more efficiently and effectively, thus releasing valuable analysis time and resources to other tasks.

Len Rigby – Head of Information, NHS Central Lancashire