How would you design and plan future hospitals to radically improve the patient experience? This is the question being asked by Lord Wolfson, founder of the Wolfson Economics Prize, who is offering £250,000 for the best design of a new hospital that will improve patient care. The initiative, which is open for everyone around the world to enter, challenges participants to consider that “this is not just a chance to rebuild our hospitals, or even to redesign them – it is a chance to re-imagine what they might achieve”.
This is an exciting brief and one which, I’m sure, will bring to the fore many new and innovative ideas. However, there is one element that I believe will be fundamental to the success of the winning proposal, no matter what the design: data. The “lifeblood” of healthcare organisations, it underpins every element of hospital operations and patient care. Any design for the hospital of the future will need to take advantage of the living and breathing nature of data, recognising the role it can not only play in improving services and experiences today, but in continuously informing how processes can be evolved and improved as new trends arise.
When it comes to the use of data, the health service isn’t making a standing-start. In the UK, some Trusts are already putting data at the heart of their operations, which in turn is helping them improve patient care and optimise service deliveries. And drawing from these learnings is a great place to start for anyone considering the hospital of the future.
What can we learn from leading industry innovators?
Data and analytics are already empowering health and care organisations around the world to optimise their services and deliver better patient experiences. Indeed, as part of an IDC study commissioned by Qlik, three-quarters of healthcare organisations reported that investments in data management and analytics had improved employee productivity (72%) and operational efficiencies (73%).
Many Trusts are taking advantage of this opportunity by putting data at the heart of decision-making processes. Take the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Trust (UHMBT)’s Royal Lancaster Infirmary site, for example, where its cutting-edge Analytical Command Centre presents real-time analysis of demand and capacity, including the number of ambulances on the way to the hospital and availability of beds, on large, interactive screens. The centre enables the team to continuously assess resources against demand, predict when surges may happen, and streamline the patient experience. In turn, this has helped to reduce delays and has increased the percentage of patients triaged within 15 minutes from 65% to 95%.
Empowering hospital staff to easily capture information also improves the ability for more informed decision-making. At Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh (WWL) Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, the patient flow manager uses a tablet to easily capture and analyse data on the number of patients awaiting discharge across different wards. The more agile reporting and analysis enabled the BI team to understand the typical wait time for patients awaiting MRIs, which has now been reduced from ten days to two.
The use of analytics helps these healthcare organisations make better and more informed decisions in the moment, directly improving the patient experience. It also proved integral to 84% of NHS Trusts’ response to the pandemic, according to research from Qlik. From tracking positive infections of patients, to identifying potential staff exposure to the virus and to inform testing, data analytics helped provide greater transparency of the COVID-19 risk to staff, patients and visitors.
Increasing the use of data in the hospital of the future
While there are great learnings that can be taken from these Trusts’ successful data strategies, there are three key ways that I believe we can expand and improve the use of data in the hospital of the future:
Cloud-based analytics – Medical experts can be expected to sit behind a computer screen to access the data which is critical to their decision-making. Analysis needs to be easily consumable on any device, no matter where staff are located in the hospital. Some Trusts currently offer this through VPNs, but cloud-based solutions provide a more seamless approach that takes away the need for time consuming sign-in processes. Cloud-based analytics also enables greater information sharing with other health and care organisations – such as social care, mental health teams, etc. At WWL, for example, the team is currently migrating its analytics solution to the cloud to enable a more joined-up response to every situation. This is all done within a governed framework to that ensures data security is maintained.
Advanced analytics and Machine Learning – The use of predictive analytics and forecasting will play an important role in helping hospitals predict resource and demand. If a Trust is able to forecast a patient’s risk of readmittance, for example, it is better prepared to manage the unscheduled demand. The team at UHMBT is currently developing a solution to this challenge that integrates autonomous machine learning capabilities into the analytics application stack. A daily prediction is then shared with the team for readmittance, which can be obtained through the Analytical Command Centre.
A shared-data model – Connecting the data of different health and care organisations to support the shift towards a population health model, which will be crucial to support the sustainability of the health service in the long term. Earlier interventions in the community, for example, can significantly reduce what has come to be an overreliance on emergency departments for primary care. However, there are two challenges that must be overcome: the first of which is data integration, as traditional processes that rely on batch uploads just aren’t cut out for a real-time data sharing across different systems and solutions. Data streaming solutions will be key to ensure information can be replicated and accessed by all organisations at any moment. Secondly, Qlik’s research found the majority of analytics solutions currently deployed by NHS Trusts are not capable of identifying population health patterns (60%). To inform population healthcare programmes, organisations need analytical solutions that can combine real-time analysis with hyper-contextual data to drive Active Intelligence.
Putting data at the heart of hospitals of the future
Lord Wolfson believes that money alone isn’t enough to solve the future healthcare challenges – we also need new ideas. I believe with data acting as the lifeblood of the organisation, hospitals of the future will be able to continuously learn, innovate and improve. This will empower practitioners to not only deliver the highest quality care in the hospital of tomorrow, but long into the future.
By Adam Mayer, Senior Manager at Qlik