Staff across all partners need to feel confident in gaining insights from data, using easy-to-use visualisation tools for decision-making, reinforced with training where required.
Key actions
- Understand what insights are required:
Be clear on decisions and relevant insights required at each level: patient/individual, service, and strategic. Use SMART KPIs (refer to High Impact Change 3).
Identify and remove unnecessary reporting: Identify and look to eliminate analysis and reporting that is not required, freeing up capacity. - Make it easier to get insights from data so that staff understand what the data means in terms of their day-to-day work. Pay attention to how staff receive data, how it is presented, and ensure accessibility via different modes of delivery:
Dashboards and visualisations: Scale and implement role-specific and intuitive to-use dashboards with key staff input and continual feedback (e.g. nurses tracking patient health, managers monitoring service demand) to give real-time, comprehensive information to support decisions. Where appropriate, join up the insights from the dashboards to avoid multiple conflicting tools. Ensuring insights come in words and visuals, not just number crunching.
Training programmes: All levels of staff should receive training on data literacy, interpretation and application.
Set up real-time insight alerts through automated routine reporting, adjustable for the right audience e.g. alerts for key risks, alerts for workforce shortages.
Establish clinical and operational decision support: Use predictive analysis to guide interventions (see High Impact Change 7). - Strive for a collective system understanding on what the data is showing to build confidence and consensus of main issues across partners.
- Equip staff with user-friendly tools, allowing users to generate insights in operational teams that link to the delivery of the service vision.
Ambition level actions
Foundational
- There is recognition of a need to be clear on decisions required to improve services at patient/individual, service and strategic levels, and to map relevant insights required for them.
- Executive level system partners are committed to providing good training in data literacy and good dashboards/data visualisation tools to support staff at all levels to gain the right insights from data across the system more easily, informing discussion and decision making.
Developing
- Relevant insights are being developed across partner organisations to support decision making at patient/individual, service and strategic levels, therefore supporting improvement as set out in the shared vision.
- There is some good training in data literacy and some good dashboards/data visualisation tools to support staff on the ground to gain the right insights from data across the system more easily, informing discussion and decision making for staff.
Established
- The relevant insights can be drawn from the data on a routine basis to support decision making at all levels.
- Staff at all levels across all partners feel confident and supported by leadership to gain the right insights from data more easily to inform discussion and decision making.
- There is a shared understanding of what the data shows.
- Key dashboards and other visualisations have been developed and are being used in these discussions. Where systems are not yet joined up in one dashboard, partners understand the discrepancies and can still use the insights.
- There is regular data-literacy training at all levels, informed by an understanding of gaps from staff.
Exemplar
- The relevant insights can be drawn from the data on a routine basis to support decision making at all levels, and there are staff who are able to approach data curiously to seek out new insights to help support discussions and decision making.
- Dashboards and other visualisations are being used widely in key discussions, with self-service analytics reducing time spent preparing manually.
- There is a shared understanding of what the data shows.