Case study: Fighting COVID-19 with data and technology

Published: 6-Jul-2020

NHS North West London (NWL) and TrueCue support COVID-19 response with advanced data and analytics technology

The organisations

The North West London Health and Care Partnership is a collaboration of eight NHS clinical commissioning groups made up of over 30 NHS and local authority organisations.

Between them they plan, buy, and provide health and care services for more than two million local residents across eight boroughs, spending around £4billion a year.

North West London, especially our black and minority ethnic communities, has been hard hit by COVID19, with Brent and Harrow two of the three most-impacted boroughs in London

With 400 GP practices, 10 hospitals, and four mental health and community health trusts across the eight boroughs, it is the largest Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) in the country.

TrueCue, part of the Concentra Group, and NWL’s relationship stretches back to 2013, and since then they have partnered on multiple initiatives.

Previous engagements include social care, mental health and Patient Risk Stratification services, all of which centred around WSIC, a data warehouse (DWH) developed by TrueCue containing data that covers all corners of the healthcare space, such as GP events, community visits, and A&E admissions.

The challenge

As was the case across the NHS, when COVID-19 struck, NWL was all hands-on deck to ensure its hospitals were not overwhelmed.

With five providers within its network, which then contain a further 15 sites which are caring for COVID-19 patients, there was a surmounting challenge to harness the right data, at the right time, to ensure the crisis was managed as effectively as possible across the region.

Each of these providers was beginning to collect data on patients within their care and this was being collated by the NWL WSIC team.

Effectively dealing with the impact of the crisis has been hugely challenging, and largely dependent on our capability to track the number of cases, monitor our hospital capacity, and ensure GPs are equipped to provide suitable aftercare

TrueCue’s role was to integrate additional datasets being provided by the hospitals into the existing WSIC DWH. This included pathology results and daily situation report data.

The company was then tasked with presenting meaningful and useful analysis which would allow the COVID taskforce, ‘Gold Command’, to track at a high-level COVID cases and hospital capacity, as well as enabling GPs to view their specific patients in order to provide suitable after care.

The solution

TrueCue offered pro-bono work to the healthcare partners in order to assist with the fight against COVID-19.

Underpinning the solution was its WISIC DWH, which allowed TrueCue to deliver six WSIC Dashboards covering the required scope:

  • Hospital KPIs: High-level overview of patients in hospital, patients discharged, and patients deceased, including overtime
  • Hospital demographics: Viewing hospital patients by demographics such as gender, age, ethnicity, and long-term conditions,/li>
  • Hospital pathways: Analysing patient journeys through hospital wards and determining mortality rates based on specific pathways
  • Mortality: Analysing mortality rates across multiple demographics
  • Geographic breakdown: Viewing COVID cases across the NWL geographies
  • COVID-19 test results: Analysing confirmed and negative cases based on pathology data

Key benefits

NWL ‘Gold Command’ now has a holistic view of demand across hospitals and other care facilities, meaning equipment and staff deployments can be better planned.

And GPs can now see which of their own patients have had COVID-19, allowing them to effectively plan aftercare.

Integration with the existing WSIC DWH has allowed for enriched data – including additional information such as demographics and pre-existing long-term conditions would not have been possible without the WSIC DWH.

By integrating COVID-19 data with existing data in the WSIC DWH, the team can now view up to date infection and mortality rates at an NWL population level, helping to drive the understanding of who is most susceptible to the virus.

Due to the evolving understanding of COVID-19 requirements changes, multiple iterations of the dashboards were necessary.

North West London has been hit particularly hard by coronavirus

North West London has been hit particularly hard by coronavirus

And TrueCue was able to overcome this challenge using Tableau, which allowed for quick prototyping and development in an agile manner.

Kavitha Saravanakumar, deputy director of business intelligence and data management at North West London Collaboration of Clinical Commissioning Groups, said: “North West London, especially our black and minority ethnic communities, has been hard hit by COVID19, with Brent and Harrow two of the three most-impacted boroughs in London.

“Needless to say, effectively dealing with the impact of the crisis has been hugely challenging, and largely dependent on our capability to track the number of cases, monitor our hospital capacity, and ensure GPs are equipped to provide suitable aftercare.

Delivering an integrated care solution with so many challenges, in a very-tight timescale, is a testament to the quality, dedication and commitment to the NHS which TrueCue continues to demonstrate in our ongoing partnership

“TrueCue’s offer of a pro-bono package of work, has been fundamental in ensuring we achieved this capability.

“Most notably, providing our COVID taskforce with the analysis they require to make daily ‘life or death’ decisions, while maintaining optimal care and support across our other services.

“Delivering an integrated care solution with so many challenges, in a very-tight timescale, is a testament to the quality, dedication and commitment to the NHS which TrueCue continues to demonstrate in our ongoing partnership.”

You may also like