BI apps help nurses see what’s happening on their wards

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Picture: CCDHB TrendCare and CCDM programme manager Emma Williams 

Business intelligence apps and a dashboard are giving nurses and midwives visibility of what is happening on their wards at Capital and Coast DHB.

The DHB is implementing the national Care Capacity Demand Management (CCDM) programme, which is due to be fully rolled out to all DHBs by 2021. 

The programme aims to ensure DHBs have the right mix and number of nursing staff on wards at any time in order to deliver care to patients, based on their acuity.

Capital and Coast TrendCare and CCDM programme manager Emma Williams says that in order to meet this aim, the DHB needed a much deeper understanding of the needs of patients and detailed insights about its nurses and midwives. 

The programme is underpinned by a nationally-defined set of metrics called the Core Data Set, and by validated patient acuity information which is held in the TrendCare workforce planning and workload management system.

Williams says that in order to use the time of busy clinical leaders effectively, the team needed to make their Core Data Set results instantly available. 

“Without this, clinical leaders would find it difficult to access the data, and time-consuming to present results from a number of different reporting systems,” she says. 

The DHB went live with a CCDM Dashboard and apps in April 2019. Using Qlik Sense and Qlik Sense Mashups, these pull results from multiple data sources including TrendCare, payroll, rostering, incident management and patient administration and make them available in one place.

“It allows full transparency about what is happening in our wards over time for both our patients and staff,” she says.

The team runs data literacy training for nursing and midwifery leaders and has built a data glossary into a Qlik app to help everyone talk the same language.

Williams says that as staff get a better understanding of where data comes from and how they can use it, the DHB has seen improved rates of data completeness.

Data insights are also available to the CCDM Council and executive management.

Demand for access to the data has driven the number of Qlik licenses from 200 to 600, with most of that driven by the CCDM program.

Hear more from Williams at our free eHealthNews.nz Live Webinar on October 28, Business Intelligence driving healthcare transformation.

If you would like to provide feedback on this news story, please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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