Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals to tackle A&E targets with new analytics tool

Hospital staff are to get the rapid insights they need to improve everything from A&E waiting times to patients’ lengths of stay now that Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has begun the deployment of a new analytics capability across the organisation.

For the first time, Connexica’s CXAIR will provide senior doctors, nurses and managerial staff across the trust with the ability to generate instant reports and dig into unprecedented detail on clinical activity, patient discharge times, A&E performance and whole range of other clinical and business areas so they can immediately respond to pressures and target resources at priority patients.

A&E has been an immediate focus and developers have already used CXAIR to create a daily A&E dashboard. This will allow clinicians and managers to see data from a variety of systems at a glance and interrogate that information in the detail required, so they can monitor and respond to the effectiveness and timeliness of care within the department, all without the need for technical data skills.

Alec Dearden, head of information services at Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “This represents a step change in the way clinical staff and executives across the trust will be able to use data to understand pressure points, improve our services to patients and to measure how well we are delivering against our goals.

“Staff throughout the hospital will no longer need to request reports from the information team. Self-service analytics, available through CXAIR, will allow people to immediately see where they need to take action. They will be able to look at the root causes of what is happening and understand where they need to focus resources – both in business areas and for patient groups.”

The A&E dashboard is just one innovation made possible through the new analytics tool. Another early application of the technology will be to examine discharge rates in the hospital so that staff can tackle any emerging factors that might delay a patient’s discharge and reduce lengths of stay across the trust.

The trust will also use CXAIR to monitor major investments. Senior hospital managers will use the technology to closely examine key performance indicators (KPIs) on large projects. This is already being applied to the trust’s electronic document management (EDM) programme, a key initiative in the drive to become paperless. The analytics platform will help to enhance project governance and allow managers to continually monitor performance, ending a reliance on manual ad hoc reports.

Automated reporting and ease of use by non-technical staff, was a key deciding factor for the trust in procuring CXAIR. Developers and information service professionals will no longer manually generate reports through Microsoft Excel and SQL tools, meaning that they can focus their efforts on other mission critical tasks for the trust.

Fast deployment was also critical. Initial go-live with the trust’s IT team happened within weeks of a decision to use the technology and deployment to business teams is now developing at pace with clinical teams set to receive access in the near future. Reports themselves are created at a much faster pace through CXAIR and in some instances have been developed within an hour, instead of the months of development time required by other technologies previously used in the trust. Continual future developments are expected. For example, it is anticipated that CXAIR could make it easier to share reports with community partners outside of the hospital.

Richard Lewis, Connexica’s managing director, said: “Identifying insights and seeing information at a glance is essential for ensuring the best-possible services are delivered to patients. CXAIR has allowed staff to interrogate the trust’s data within days of trust using the system. As the tool helps to generate growing numbers of reports and dashboards, staff across the trust will be able to understand demands and manage services even more effectively.”