Analytics Healthcare Software Slashes Decision Making Times

The Tibco Spotfire in-memory analytics software empowers users with speed and freedom, with an approach that helps discover new insights from collected data and answer questions with accuracy. Spotfire also gives end users more control, which speeds "time to answers" while reducing typical bottlenecks, such as building new business intelligence reports or reconfiguring databases. Unlike traditional business intelligence systems, the software is completely adaptable to business processes across the organization, giving information technology (IT) an extensible analytics platform, reducing the number of custom and packaged applications that need to be supported.

“One of the biggest challenges we face is boiling the vast amounts of data down into information that allows the medical director and others to make informed decisions quickly,” said Daniel Ray, director of informatics at NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB; United Kingdom). “Typically these monthly meetings are data-led and used to make decisions relating to hospital or clinical procedures, as well as operational and other patient care matters. Ward, diagnostic, clinician, and patient data is reviewed in great detail, often leading to questions that require the data to be cut slightly differently each time. Historically that meant going away and creating that dataset and its results, delaying a decision until the next monthly meeting.”

“Meetings could often close with more questions posed than answered, with key decisions delayed. Once meetings reconvened, time would be wasted recapping the last meeting and outstanding questions, which would be frustrating and time consuming for all,” added Mr. Ray. “With Tibco Spotfire, those questions can be put to the data as they are asked, and answered immediately. That data can also be drilled into by interacting with the visualization through a mouse or other pointing device, right down to anonymized individual patient data.”

In collaboration with Tibco Spotfire (Somerville, MA, USA), UHB has developed a series of data packages that are offered commercially to other parts of the NHS. These patient anonymized packages allow other hospitals and bodies to access benchmarking analytics in a wide range of areas such as clinical outcomes, mortality rates, and hospital appointment attendance rates.

Related Links:
NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospitals Birmingham
Tibco Spotfire