In the earlier stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many healthcare organizations aggressively tracked data to comply with state reporting requirements, without a real-time data strategy. However, earlier this summer, as many state and local governments ended their emergency orders, healthcare organizations began to slow their data collection measures. Now, as cases begin to rise again, hospitals are facing unexpected shortages from staff to ICU beds and oxygen supply.
In a session at Qlik World 2021, Mark Singleton, who is the Associate Director of Data Analytics & Assurance at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) in northern England, described how WWL felt underprepared as COVID-19 patients quickly began to fill hospitals last year. WWL had not started updating their clinical system to be able to capture patient data from COVID-19. However, as a hospital with one of the lowest bed-to-population ratios in Greater Manchester, it was imperative that WWL was able to look ahead on how they would maximize use.
Fortunately, WWL had already invested in a resident data scientist and a modern analytics platform. With access to advanced data analytics tools and integration with writeback capability, WWL was able to capture new data insights as soon as COVID-19 patients entered their doors. WWL’s data team was then able to apply this instantaneous data to their predictive work, begin modeling what demand would look like, and use these analyses to strategically inform operational decisions. Through a SaaS platform, WWL was also able to immediately share this data with partners. This data helped WWL to rank as the second-best performing health organization during the pandemic out of about 50 organizations in northern England.
With real-time, up-to-date information, WWL established an intelligent data-to-analytics pipeline, allowing information to flow continuously to everyday processes in a business intelligence model known as Active Intelligence. Active Intelligence is designed to trigger immediate actions through strategic decisions and is beneficial for organizations that must act swiftly in emergency situations such as public health crises and disaster response.
Active Intelligence helps organizations embrace growth from passive or reactive data collection to using real-time data to inform actionable insights. This closes gaps between relevant data and actionable data, as collecting data serves little purpose if organizations don’t have a way to use it.
Singleton urges healthcare organizations not to step back and to stay proactive in their data collection and integration efforts: “You may not be thinking about advanced analytics or have a use case for it here and now, but if you can, it’s definitely worth looking at it and investing if possible, because you never know what’s around the corner.”
To learn more about Active Intelligence, watch the webinar “Enabling Active Intelligence in Your Organization with an Analytics Data Pipeline” at Qlik World 2021.
