Reducing Rotherham's outpatient wait time by 65%

Managing complex outpatient flows had presented the Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust with a number of challenges. Before we began working with the Rotherham General Hospital team, managers and clinical staff were manually combining national and hospital-level data spread across multiple systems and spreadsheets. This laborious process meant snapshot reports could only be produced either weekly or monthly – and they were out of date within an hour. As a consequence, service managers had only a rudimentary grasp of capacity and demand and waiting lists remained stubbornly high.

BCN’s expertise in healthcare led them to use Microsoft Power BI to link data sources and create near real-time data visualisations for 250,000 outpatient appointments.

Rotherham General Hospital’s new system based on Power BI:

• reduced outpatient waiting lists by 65% in some areas after just 6 months generating an annual cost saving of £800,000.
• combined data from national hospitals (e.g. eRS) with the hospital’s own database
• provided organisation wide access from desktop PC and the cloud
• collated information in clear and simple interactive visual charts
• improved the management of finances, HR, theatres, outpatient and A&E
• provided data on which timely resource allocation decisions could be based
• equipped frontline staff and managers with real time data tools
• provided analytics data on which to better predict future needs.
• reduced internal technical resource requirements by automating many processes.

Constrained by funding pressures, the Trust rolled out the system at minimal cost and almost instantly recouped the investment many times over by recording the dramatic results mentioned above after just six months.

Rotherham Hospital deals with around 75,000 A&E patients, 55,000 inpatients and 250,000 outpatient attendances each year.

We worked closely with the Trust’s operational and IT teams to address their key objectives and used our expertise in Microsoft BI as the key to developing bespoke processes which solve many of the organisation-wide data issues.

BCN took a holistic approach to bringing the data to life. This involved collating, automating and linking data and also representing the data in visually appealing, interactive charts that make life much easier for managers, frontline staff and decision-makers on all levels.