The Christie NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist cancer center that treats over 44,000 patients a year. It’s the largest single-site cancer center in Europe.
In the past, nurses had a hard time surfacing noncompliance issues. By the time the issue was identified, either the next day or next month, the window of opportunity had already passed.
Today, nurses access data on their nurse assessment dashboards, published on Tableau Server. In video 1, Daniel Tibble, Business Intelligence Manager, explains how nurses track patient assessments in real time, on a ward by ward basis. Active Directory allows the business intelligence team to manage permissions and keep the underlying data safe.
In video 2, Daniel shares how other departments in the hospital create and share dashboards, leading to more data discovery and engagement. As Daniel explains, professionals who “previously saw working with technology as incidental to their role are really engaging with it to be able to deliver better patient care.”
Tableau: Tell us about the Christie and how you’re using Tableau.
Daniel Tibble, Business Intelligence Manager: The Christie is a specialist cancer center. The dashboards in the Christie are created by a combination of my team, the business intelligence team, and there's also users out there who are comfortable using Tableau as a tool, who are able to interrogate the data, make their own findings, and produce dashboards off the back, which we can then surface using Tableau Server.
A lot of our reporting comes from the operational side to make sure that the operation managers and the teams know what's happening on a day-to-day basis in the hospital. We've also got a number of clinically focused dashboards. We've got some dashboards that are focused for nursing assessment care. We're also trying to surface some clinical outcome data within Tableau and working closely with our clinical outcomes team to do that.
Tableau: Have you had any "wow" moments with Tableau?
Daniel: The biggest wow factor so far with Tableau Server has been our nurse assessment dashboards. This has meant that the nurses can track which patients haven't had assessments on a ward by ward basis in real time. By surfacing the data in real time, it means that the nurses can deal with any noncompliance issues before it becomes a problem. Previously, if you're surfacing that the next day or the next month, the period of being able to do the assessments within the six-hour window has already passed.
Tableau: How do you keep sensitive healthcare data safe within those dashboards?
Daniel: We synchronize Tableau Server with Active Directory, which allows us to very quickly manage people's access, not just to Tableau, but also the underlying data sources and our report provisioning software. This dashboard is by far and away our most used site on Tableau Server. We get around 500 hits a month. It's a great example of a role that previously saw working with technology as incidental to their role to really engaging with it to be able to deliver better patient care.