Engagement Period January 2017 - July 2017

The Challenge

Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) identified a need to develop and embed robust data quality assurance processes ahead of their planned migration to a new patient information system. Their requirement was for a product that could provide daily data quality issue reports against their CSC PiMS information system for operational teams to monitor and address.

The product needed to be easy to configure, transparent, and with the potential to accommodate analysis of data quality across multiple source systems.

GOSH were keen to use their existing online reports visualisation system (QlikView) to display the new data quality reports. The requirement was thus to deliver a set of data quality output tables for GOSH use to publish a suite of data quality reports through QlikView.

The Approach

Cloud21 deployed its IDS: DW database and Validation module to deliver the required outputs to the Trust.

The Validation module is integrated into the daily Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process, and logs the details of all data quality issues that match pre- defined criteria.

The Cloud21 team worked closely and collaboratively with the Trust’s Information team to:

• Map and import PiMS source data to the IDS: DW tables
• Compose SQL queries to match each of the Trust’s data quality metric specifications
• Agree specifications for data quality issue output tables for patient details, referrals, outpatient appointments, inpatient stays (phase 1) and theatres sessions (phase 2).
• Enhance and configure the Validation module to meet the GOSH requirements.
• Deliver daily data quality issue details to the agreed output table specifications.

The development of the data quality output tables was an iterative process which reflected emerging needs that were identified during the QlikView reports development.

Phase 1 (patient details, referrals, outpatient appointments, inpatient stays) took place between January and March 2017 with the reports available for deployment as planned on 1st April. Phase 2 (theatres) took place during June 2017.

Training was delivered to key Informatics staff to empower them in maintaining and developing the tool themselves.

The knowledge and expertise provided by Cloud21 enabled GOSH to rapidly develop and deploy a bespoke data validation reporting tool at the start of April 2017.

Cloud21’s experience with healthcare processes, health information and data issues facilitated rapid translation of data quality specifications to SQL database queries.

How did our work deliver value to the Client?

GOSH successfully deployed their data quality reporting tool within the planned project timescales. The first phase of data quality reports was deployed for operational use from 1st April.

The deployment of data quality metrics in phase 2 for a new area of activity (theatres) demonstrated the flexibility of the Validation module to expand to meet future data quality needs.

GOSH are able to maintain and develop the data quality tool themselves, reducing their dependence on Cloud21 for future expansion of the tool.