Qlik (NASDAQ: QLIK), a leader in data discovery, today announced that NHS North of England Commissioning Support Unit (NECS) is using its QlikView platform to provide a data analysis solution for health and wellbeing organisations across the North of England. With the solution, based on QlikView, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) can analyse their data and get a more rounded view of patient situations in order to choose the right paths for treatment and, ultimately, improve care.
NECS is a Commissioning Support Unit (CSU) set up to provide a range of services and solutions to help GPs and clinicians improve outcomes for patients and healthcare for local communities. The CSU is based in the North of England and supports 13 Clinical Commissioning Groups across Teesside, Durham, Tyne and Wear and Cumbria. NECS is tasked with creating solutions that will help enhance the quality of healthcare across the region. It therefore wanted to move away from cumbersome, ad-hoc reporting processes, and bring together a ‘single version of the truth’ allowing users to drill down to gain intelligence from high level trends to detailed patient level data in order to make the best patient centred decisions.
With QlikView, it has created a Business Intelligence solution called RAIDR (Reporting Analysis and Intelligence Delivering Results), which has been developed with input from those who will actually use it, in particular GPs. Now they can use RAIDR to examine patient information and assess the best steps for providing the most appropriate level of patient care. Due to the intuitive QlikView interface, clinicians gain a better understanding of the treatments a patient has received to date. This can be anything from looking at the situation in which a patient has been discharged from hospital and taking steps to avoid re-admission, to seeing which patients are coming into A&E with minor ailments or signposting when patients could be receiving treatment or care at home or in the community.
Ian Davison, NECS Business Information Services Director said “We have created a tool which has received much praise for its power, speed, flexibility, usability, breadth and depth. The system is very flexible as it allows users to navigate, select and drill down to gain intelligence in a wide variety of ways, from high level trends to detailed patient data. A range of dashboards are included, covering the information and intelligence needs of GPs as commissioners and also for practice management.”
Although there are examples of innovation in the NHS, there are too few and there is a tendency to reinvent the wheel. NECS recognises that innovation is not just about ideas; it is the successful implementation of ideas. RAIDR was launched to GP practices in Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland in 2010. Since then the project has raised a high level of interest across the rest of the country. Growth in the number of GP practices using RAIDR has been exponential, within the next few months 20% of all practices across England will have licences to use RAIDR. Other CSUs are now interested in reselling RAIDR in order to fulfil a need from GP practices in their locality.
“Knowing that QlikView is being used to improve healthcare across large regions of the country is a great testament to the value of being able to truly understand data,” said Sean Farrington, Qlik UK & Ireland MD and RVP Northern Europe. “NECS has developed a truly innovative solution around our platform that harnesses patient data to help GPs help their patients – and knowing that their work is likely to spread further is a real testament to how much QlikView is helping to drive top notch patient care.”
Image Credit: Qlik
