The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 issue 5 (Oct) | Page 36

Data Visualisation Empowers UK Healthcare Organisations to Modernise... Continued from page 33 on IT departments to provide answers to data questions, creating a never-ending cycle of long wait times and inflexible results. IT has faced the inverse challenge. They spend dozens of hours churning out reports and responding to requests that often fall short of what the requester wanted to know. Healthcare providers are turning the tables on this status quo, empowering individuals throughout their organisations to explore data to answer their own questions. Not only is this yielding faster, more insightful actions, it’s letting IT get back to the business of building and maintaining a reliable infrastructure backbone. Clinics and hospitals have accomplished this by providing easy, intuitive tools to individual users. By creating a self-service model, IT and business intelligence teams are shifting away from reacting to business intelligence requests and toward training individuals and departments to ask and answer their own questions. Using data from multiple systems to reveal trends and outliers allows healthcare providers to answer complex questions when it comes to delivering timely, effective treatments. When empowered to investigate information with intuitive tools, departments throughout healthcare providers can more aggressively explore data that’s relevant to them. Departments now proactively investigate patterns in data and work to understand why these exist. The impact of ‘thinking big’ about what data can reveal is significant. Hospitals have uncovered underlying, recurring issues with claims processing that have let them proactively identify claims codes that need a different level of attention to be processed on time. Physicians running studies are identifying patients who not only haven’t been adhering to protocols, but glean insight as to the possible reasons behind this in order to take action. Scotland’s public healthcare system is rich with data, including important details about patient demographics, health 6&P