Case study
Data solutions for Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust
Summary
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) are a major acute and community trust dedicated to providing the best possible healthcare. Operating across five hospital sites and numerous community locations, they invest around £300m each year in order to design their services around the needs of their patients.
Company size
4,600+
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
WWL saw an opportunity for change. After years of working stuck between two data warehouse versions, the WWL team were consumed by delays, hours of manual processing and a solution that was unreliable and not fit for purpose. As Mark Singleton, Associate Director of IM&T at the Trust would later describe: “the future didn’t look bright” — they needed something better.
As increasing mergers and collaboration between trusts was starting to take place, the business case for a new solution emerged — one that would meet all of their requirements, starting with a single version of the truth.
WWL looked at their options, knowing they needed a single data warehouse solution and while in the past this may have been done in house, the Trust concluded this wouldn’t meet the timeframe objectives, and with that in mind went out to tender for a partner to help bring in this solution.
Solution
CACI were initially appointed by WWL to implement their proposed solution: InView Express.
The InView data warehouse solution was specifically designed for the NHS market and when CACI were appointed by WWL, it had already been implemented in many trusts across the UK.
WWL could see the design of InView had incorporated the complexities required for an NHS data warehouse. It would allow them to produce the Trust’s national datasets and statutory returns and bring all siloed data sources into a single data warehouse, providing an accurate and co-ordinated view of the Trust’s services.
Plus, with the intuitive environment of InView, users across the Trust would be able view and analyse the data easily, and subsequently make effective decisions in an efficient way.
Thinking of the future ahead, WWL took the decision to take on all of the InView modules at the beginning, providing the capability to grow as they took on new data sources. This would soon provide to be an invaluable decision.
After benefiting from the InView solution for a few years and expanding its use, a new challenge appeared: WWL were to take on Community and Mental Health services, and this was a significant increase to their services and data.
Mark Singleton, Associate Director of IM&T at WWL, explains: “It’s not everyday that you’re being asked to grow services by 20-25%”, and that taking on these new areas would bring with it many different national datasets that the Trust had never dealt with before.
With additional returns and outputs due in a short space of time, WWL turned to CACI’s experience in working with community data to help them develop these new datasets in order to meet the national standard.
Results
Since implementing InView and later expanding it to support the new Trust requirements, WWL now have a reliable foundation which frees up capacity to focus on analysis of data and more strategic goals.
The team no longer spend time troubleshooting issues or hours processing data manually and can take on proactive improvements in house such as developing SQL.
WWL are making the most of the robustness of InView, with their database projected to be almost 2TB by 2021. For the Trust this is invaluable, as with some tables containing over 150 million records, they are able to record and manage vast amounts of historical data.
As CACI has invested and improved InView over the past few years, WWL are also utilising the regular updates in order to continually improve and evolve their reporting. Recently WWL have been looking at semantic reporting as a next step to improving the consolidated view of data across the Trust and will be further enhancing their deployment by using the new InView Extensions functionality
By optimising their use of InView, focusing on data analysis and striving to be a data-driven organisation through continual improvements, WWL are empowered to make efficiency savings, and improve the quality of care for patients across Wigan.
Case study
Data solutions and digital transformation at North Bristol NHS Trust
Summary
As one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK with an annual turnover of £532 million, North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) recognised the value that implementing new data architecture and deploying business intelligence software would have on wider business outcomes. To achieve this, they enlisted a trusted data partner, CACI.
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
NBT was struggling with NHS statutory changes, reporting pressures, disparate systems and data quality overheads. In order to solve these challenges, NBT looked to implement a Trust-wide data warehouse and business intelligence solution.
In addition to the data warehousing solution, NBT had many disparate reporting tool options, and it was important to implement one solution where any member of staff could go to source any report or dashboard output.
Following implementation, NBT needed the solution to be maintained under a managed service offering but built in a way to ensure self-sufficiency in the Trust’s team, so that the solution could be extended in line with new and changed requirements
Solution
NBT chose CACI to provide and implement a new data architecture including a Trust-wide data warehouse solution, managed service support, and deployment of leading business intelligence (BI) software.
The solution integrates a vast quantity of data from many disparate sources including administrative, clinical and finance systems. Additionally, the solution incorporates business logic in order to calculate and model the Trust’s income. The solution is fully maintained by CACI through the provision of a managed service and a structured product release schedule.
The solution incorporates a layered database architecture incorporating integration, Operational Data Store, translation, star schema and semantic data mart layers. This design reduces ongoing maintenance costs and increases flexibility to new requirements or interface changes.
Historical data integrity is preserved through the implementation of an efficient, slowly changing dimensions design, and a full data quality process is built into the data flow enabling reporting and resolution of data quality issues. Both row and column-level security governance is built into the design along with NHS privacy measures.
The logical design of the solution along with its interfaces is documented along with physical database design features to achieve optimal performance on the operating platform.
Data was migrated and re-factored from legacy solutions to maintain data history, and particular attention was made to how the cut-over point was implemented.
NBT benefited from CACI’s experience in promoting outcome-based dashboards for the healthcare sector. This enabled NBT to set up the best possible framework and method for rollout of BI analytics across the organisation, ensuring high stakeholder engagement for outcome alignment and adoption of change. Experience in the use of data science has allowed the Trust to further exploit its data to help improve patient outcomes through accurate predictions.
Results
Since implementation, NBT has been able to centralise its BI function and source all data through the single-governed version of the truth. It has ensured data readiness, completeness and accuracy is in place and always available for reporting.
NBT’s income is comprehensively calculated on a daily basis, with data quality issues managed and corrected in a timely fashion. The accuracy and completeness of this process has delivered a significant financial benefit to the Trust and an early return on investment.
Data is readily available and accessible to stakeholders across the Trust via a centralised portal, with most data updated on a daily basis and some updated every two minutes, allowing near real-time decision making.
Following a jointly executed project, training and knowledge transfer, the NBT team are fully empowered and self-sufficient in the use and future expansion of the solution. This covers construction of analytics and addition of new data sources.
Through the innovative design of the CACI solution, NBT benefits from a fully-maintained core product, yet retain the flexibility to expand the solution to meet local and future needs (e.g. adding new data attributes, entities and rules).
NBT are part of the CACI NHS User Community and benefit from the sharing of content and ideas with other trusts, as well as benefitting from CACI’s commitment to and investment in the NHS.
Case study
Power BI migration & implementation process & outcomes for North Bristol Trust (NBT) – part 1
Summary
When North Bristol Trust (NBT) was tasked with migrating their existing reporting tool to Power BI, CACI was their trusted partner that supported the successful production of a migration readiness package. This readiness package included a detailed report of all quantitative and qualitative findings, a newfound understanding of existing functions and capabilities, a reassessment of future requirements and definitive progression of next steps in the Trust’s migration from business case creation to sign-off.
NBT possessed over 100 reports in their pre-existing analytics platform, ranging from list-based for front line, operational workers to more backend, dashboard and analysis reports for email distribution. Once these reports needed to move from NBT’s pre-existing system to Power BI, the Trust wanted to understand and reconsider their design, particularly its contents and data structure.
Andrew Elliott, Head of Data Analytics at North Bristol Trust, has handled analytics platform outputs and has been a key player in the Trust’s Power BI migration.
Company size
13,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Power BI
Challenge
The first course of action identified for NBT was the need to improve efficiency when creating reports. This was a multi-step action, not simply addressing the speed at which reports are updated, but the efficiency and maintenance of data.
To achieve this, Andrew’s team revisited their hospital data analysis practices to ensure they would remain up-to-date, reliable and accurate.
There was also an emphasis on redesigning the data models that fed the reports to meet requirements. This required a substantial amount of analysis to understand where data was coming from and what NBT was doing with that data to display the report. Once this analysis was complete, NBT had to consider how it could be streamlined to become more efficient and recreate that logic in a new location within their data warehouse.
Solution
This process took the Trust substantial time and input from CACI, with Richard Brennan, CACI’s Principal Consultant, working on the mapping process and providing ongoing support to Andrew’s team.
Determining the best data design followed this. Andrew’s team had ambitions on what the Trust wanted to do with their data, an especially crucial factor being that through Power BI, other analysts from across the hospital could be brought on board.
In the weeks prior to going live, Andrew’s team liaised with key individuals across the Trust on upcoming reports, Power BI was displayed on the intranet’s homepage and a Power BI developer group was established for updates from Andrew’s team, their use of Power BI and best practice sharing.
Once the reports were signed off as tested, they were moved into the appropriate workspace apps for users. A soft launch took place prior to go-live to ensure comfortability of using Power BI and address any final issues. Finally, users were added to groups for immediate access and the original platform was turned off, marking the official introduction of Power BI.
The diversity of requirements and revisiting the data design were two pivotal focal points to be reprioritised over the course of the implementation.
The ambition around optimised data design was initially obfuscated due to the comparatively little data available from clinical divisions and departments across the hospital that used Excel. This prompted Andrew and his team to encourage the use of one cohesive reporting platform to ensure data sufficiency, accuracy and reliability, creating an environment that analysts would engage with and host their reporting on.
The immense size of this ambition quickly became clear to the Trust, particularly regarding the data scope, the systems it took from, the amount of available data and the data used by divisional analysts. Upon further investigation into data sources, an added layer of complexity came to be: rebuilding all the data sources into a new data model would be impossible to achieve by the stringent deadline. With CACI’s help, however, the situation took a positive turn.
“CACI provided helpful support and advice [during this time], even during times where I think our project had gone from a green to an amber stage where we were coming into the last couple of months,” Andrew shared. “CACI was incredibly supportive of the decisions that we were making, also contributing to those decisions themselves.”
Results
Richard’s Power BI configuration set up Andrew’s team for a successful first few weeks of post-go-live, with the team receiving about 600 hits on reports in the first two days post-go-live and approximately 60 support requests.
According to Andrew, Richard’s continued support in demonstrating any changes to the semantic models, identifying any issues with uploading data or explaining the environment’s functions has been particularly useful.
“We had Richard in the background with any small changes that we wanted to do with the data loads or semantic models, and that support was useful in the run-up and afterwards, because we’ve watched how to look after this system as Richard has built it, but when you’re actually live and you’ve got to look after yourself, it’s nice to have that bit of hand-holding as you learn,” he explained.
NBT has presently moved out of the post-go-live period of constant close monitoring and rapid issue resolution towards a business-as-usual position. Plans for future enhancements can now be reviewed, along with an assessment of the Trust’s future and the potential of reaching a similar outcome with NBT’s partner, UHBW, enabling both data teams to identically view data across Trusts and share it seamlessly.
The project’s success also led to Andrew and his team being nominated by NBT’s Operations leadership for their annual staff award, an internal mark of excellence and recognition for a project well-delivered.
Case study
United Lincolnshire increases income through costing analysis
Summary
United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the largest trusts in the country. It provides a comprehensive range of hospital-based medical, surgical, paediatric, obstetric and gynaecological services to the people of Lincolnshire and beyond, through three main hospitals and 90 other locations.
With a turnover of more than £400m each year, United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust invests millions in improving clinical services by replacing and upgrading medical equipment, modernising facilities and improving IT infrastructure.
To ensure maximum benefits from these investments, costing is a business-critical issue. We spoke to Assistant Finance Manager, Robin Solly at United Lincolnshire on how the use of CACI’s flagship solution, Synergy 4, is helping them reach their goals.
Company size
9,500
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
Costing
For United Lincolnshire Hospital Trust, costing had always been an exercise undertaken purely for the purpose of the national cost collection. For the teams involved, the manual process of extracting the data and getting the required outputs was extremely difficult, meaning the data was rarely used for operational or strategic purposes.
Managing change
A new push for change came as the mandated costing requirements for acute trusts changed and CACI was appointed to deliver a solution that would enable all of these improvements.
Solution
Once CACI had identified Synergy 4 as the best solution, a nine-month implementation phase began.
Robin Solly from United Lincolnshire’s finance team commented on the approach that was taken to ensure the solution was built with the trust in mind:
“Our implementation phase had superb on-site support from a CACI consultant, who spent considerable time in understanding our organisation so that the construct of our costing model reflected the way in which the Trust’s activity is delivered.”
Ease of use for the costing practitioner was an important aspect to ensure the Trust could get maximum benefit in an efficient way. Synergy was implemented for the trust to be able to automate processes that had previously been manual, time consuming exercises, which in turn removed a significant amount of time from the costing process.
Results
Since the implementation of Synergy 4, the Trust has been able to produce quarterly PLICS reporting. A summarised model of income against expenditure, by specialty and point-of-delivery has been made available to clinical service managers and patient level outputs available to local finance teams.
Robin explained that the ability to drill down into the detail helped support the key insights revealed at the summary level:
“PLICS data is now a key analysis tool used in our acute service review process with a number of specialties specifically requesting detailed patient level financial analysis to understand which clinical activities are generating a positive / negative contribution margin and why.”
Robin went on to recount a recent example of a department seeing direct benefits from this solution:
“There was the specialty who, as a result of our patient level analysis, realised that a whole strata of their activity was not being charged to our commissioners due to an administration error that precluded its inclusion in our SLAM reports. Without PLICS, this would not have happened and has resulted in substantial additional income for the Trust.”
Empowered with detailed insights, the United Lincolnshire Hospital trust continue to work with CACI on how they can take further steps to generate more insight from their data and improve outcomes across the trust.
Case study
A standardised data warehouse designed for current and future NHS Trust needs
Summary
Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust provides acute health care services from Torbay Hospital, along with community health services and adult social care. It was the first Trust in England to integrate hospital and community care with social care.
The Trust has around 6,500 staff and 800 volunteers. It runs Torbay Hospital as well as five community hospitals and other local clinics. It provides health and social care to the local population, with around 500,000 face-to-face contacts in patients’ homes and communities each year, serving a resident population of approximately 286,000 people, plus about 100,000 holiday visitors at any one time in the summer season.
Company Size
6,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products Used
Challenge
South Devon and Torbay has used InView for many years, with the original solution implemented in 2006. More recently, the Trust has experienced challenging times in its IT division, with tight budgets limiting staff and resources. This led to key systems becoming outdated, through lack of investment in upgrades and system replacements.
The resourceful IT team used workarounds and in-house development to bridge gaps and connect systems, to draw essential clinical and financial insight from the Trust’s data, stored in disparate sources.
Head of Data Engineering, Stephen Judd says: “On top of this, since Covid, there have been big organisational changes in the Trust, including new wards, which affected the data we work with. And a lot of our lookup tables were based on old national standards. Although we had a made series of updates to the standards and data dictionary, our Patient Administration System (PAS) and InView hadn’t caught up.”
In 2020, Torbay and South Devon received funding to upgrade their SQL server and jumped at the chance. Stephen Judd says: “We knew we needed to upgrade the InView system as well and seized the opportunity to present a business case for this. It was accepted – but we needed to implement by the end of the financial year – less than four months away. Normally, we would have planned twice as long for this type of data warehouse project.”
Tight budgets
Limited staff and resource
Out of date systems
Solution
CACI agreed to work with Stephen and his team to deliver a new InView data warehouse against the tight deadline. Stephen explains: “CACI provided overall consultancy to plan the data warehouse migration. With many vacancies in our data team, we also used CACI consultants to backfill. Due to time and resource constraints, we didn’t have as much engagement with the information team and data team as we wanted. Moreover, some of our old source systems and extracts didn’t have an Information Asset Owner or anyone who understood the data architecture fully. We had to do a lot of interrogation analysis to bridge this knowledge gap. We wouldn’t have been able to deliver the project without CACI’s support with this.”
CACI’s consultants worked with Stephen’s team to implement the latest version of the InView data warehouse for healthcare organisations. It brings together feeds from in-patient, outpatient, critical care, the old maternity system, neo-natal and paediatric and some community and extended data (from InfoFlex) that adds richness and detail to patient records – for example, information from GP discharge letters.
Torbay and South Devon’s core project embraced the core data feeds they knew best. Stephen’s team set a stretch goal to bring some of the Trust’s community data in. This was particularly challenging, as it was poorly defined and spread over eight systems.
Stephen says: “Some of the services had started setting up their own booking systems outside our main PAS and using InfoFlex. Drawing on CACI’s expertise and resources, we were able to merge these in, which has made our data more complete and accurate again.”
To improve outputs and reporting, the team replaced a daily, fixed format export routine originally written in the 1980s. They built new feeds for demographic, inpatient and outpatient data from the SWIFT bed management system.
Results
Torbay and South Devon NHS Trust could have chosen to build its own custom solution. But InView has a powerful advantage. Stephen explains: “If we create anything bespoke, we have to support it. And we don’t have capacity.”
There has been a big shift because of Covid – the NHS is moving towards a more standardised national view of income. “InView means we can accommodate national SUS calculations and keep pace as our obligations increase each year, because it uses a recognised best practice approach. With InView, we have a proven, standard platform and can make local adjustments for a perfect fit to our organisation,” says Stephen.
For ongoing support, CACI’s team is responsible for upgrades and loading new tariffs. Stephen can focus his own engineers on getting the data right. This is key, because some of NHS England’s payment to the Trust relies on it. Stephen gives an example: “We discovered that a percentage of our outpatient activity had the wrong consultant speciality, which potentially reduces our national NHS income. With CACI maintaining InView, I have the resources to investigate and rectify that type of issue.
“The beauty of working with CACI is that they take ownership of everything they promise in the scope of the agreement, and fix it. They provided excellent project management. I didn’t have to chase up work or check every detail – you can only do that with real trust in the team’s capability and judgement to escalate when needed.
“The InView data warehouse is a product that will last us ten or more years – it’s our one source of data for all key reporting so it’s a critical solution for the Trust. Amongst the many programmes I’m responsible for, it was a relief not to have to worry about this one, because CACI has earned our trust and confidence throughout a long working relationship. CACI’s engineers are extremely experienced and were able to jump in, ask intelligent questions, and deal with unfamiliar and unusual data feeds and systems! The project manager provided excellent communication throughout, so I didn’t need to intervene and always knew the latest status and progress.”
Peter Sheard, IT Programme Manager, Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust
Case study
Power BI migration and implementation process and outcomes for North Bristol Trust (NBT) – part 2
Summary
When North Bristol Trust (NBT) was tasked with migrating their existing reporting tool to Power BI, CACI was their trusted partner that supported the successful production of a migration readiness package. This readiness package included a detailed report of all quantitative and qualitative findings, a newfound understanding of existing functions and capabilities, a reassessment of future requirements and definitive progression of next steps in the Trust’s migration from business case creation to sign-off.
NBT possessed over 100 reports in their pre-existing analytics platform, ranging from list-based for front line, operational workers to more backend, dashboard and analysis reports for email distribution. Once these reports needed to move from NBT’s pre-existing system to Power BI, the Trust wanted to understand and reconsider their design, particularly its contents and data structure.
Company size
13,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Power BI
Challenge
Andrew Elliott, Head of Data Analytics at North Bristol Trust, has handled analytics platform outputs and has been a key player in the Trust’s Power BI migration.
The first course of action identified for NBT was the need to improve efficiency when creating reports. This was a multi-step action, not simply addressing the speed at which reports are updated, but the efficiency and maintenance of data.
To achieve this, Andrew’s team revisited their hospital data analysis practices to ensure they would remain up-to-date, reliable and accurate.
There was also an emphasis on redesigning the data models that fed the reports to meet requirements. This required a substantial amount of analysis to understand where data was coming from and what NBT was doing with that data to display the report. Once this analysis was complete, NBT had to consider how it could be streamlined to become more efficient and recreate that logic in a new location within their data warehouse.
With these needs in consideration, Andrew’s team reached a consensus on the requirement for a new reporting database, as well as a redesign of the data models that would facilitate the moving of their reporting tool.
Solution
This process took the Trust a lot of time and input from CACI to execute, as the initial input stages were focused on providing business knowledge and data understanding, with CACI possessing the technical knowledge. CACI’s Richard Brennan, Principal Consultant, worked on the mapping process and provided ongoing support to Andrew’s team.
Determining the best design for that data followed this. Andrew’s team had ambitions on what the Trust wanted to do with their data, one of which was knowing that through Power BI, other analysts from across the hospital could be brought on board. The board was an especially important and crucial factor as NBT approached the Power BI go-live date. For Andrew’s team, this included ensuring alignment on decision-making, gaining organisation-wide buy-in and keeping motivation up.
“We weren’t putting our head in the sand, we were very honest with any issues that we had and [the board was] immensely helpful in their responses, particularly around communication,” Andrew shared.
In the weeks prior to going live, Andrew’s team liaised with key individuals in the Trust across various departments and divisions on the status of upcoming reports. Power BI also began to be displayed on the intranet’s homepage of the intranet for collective awareness on Power BI going live. NBT followed an additional CACI recommendation of forming a Power BI developer group for regular meetings to take place on what Andrew’s team was doing, how they were using Power BI, encourage others to use Power BI and share best practises.
All licenses were in place and once the reports were signed off as tested, they were moved into the appropriate workspace apps for users. A soft launch using advanced functionality for several areas took place a week prior to go-live to ensure comfortability of using Power BI and iron out any final issues before eradicating their pre-existing BI tool. The final step was adding users to groups for immediate access and turning off the original platform.
By Friday afternoon, users were given access while the original platform remained available over the weekend, and by Monday morning, a blocking page prohibiting access was implemented, marking the official introduction of Power BI.
The diversity of requirements and revisiting the data design were two pivotal focal points to be reprioritised over the course of the implementation.
The ambition around optimised data design was initially obfuscated due to the comparatively little data available from various clinical divisions and departments across the hospital that used Excel. This prompted Andrew and his team to encourage the use of one cohesive reporting platform to ensure data sufficiency, accuracy and reliability, creating an environment that analysts would engage with and host their reporting on and unite users.
The immense size of this ambition quickly became clear to the Trust, particularly regarding the data scope, the systems it took from, the amount of available data and the data that was also being used by divisional analysts. The Trust also acknowledged the fixed date by which this project had to be completed. Upon further investigation into the data sources, an added layer of complexity came to be: rebuilding all the data sources into a new data model would not be possible to achieve by the stringent deadline. With CACI’s help, however, the situation took a positive turn.
“CACI provided helpful support and advice [during this time], even during times where I think our project had gone from a green to an amber stage where we were coming into the last couple of months,” Andrew shared. “CACI was incredibly supportive of the decisions that we were making, also contributing to those decisions themselves.”
Results
Richard’s Power BI configuration has set up Andrew’s team for a successful first few weeks of post-go-live, with the team receiving about 600 hits on reports in the first two days post-go-live and receiving approximately 60 support requests (mainly access requests or general functionality enquiries). While some minor accuracy issues with outpatients arose and were resolved quickly, the reporting has remained accurate and was very well received by the end users.
According to Andrew, Richard’s continued support in demonstrating any changes to the semantic models, identifying any issues with uploading data or explaining the environment’s functions has been particularly useful.
“We had Richard in the background with any small changes that we wanted to do with the data loads or semantic models, and that support was useful in the run-up and afterwards, because we’ve watched how to look after this system as Richard has built it, but when you’re actually live and you’ve got to look after yourself, it’s nice to have that bit of hand-holding as you learn,” he explained.
That brings us to present day, where NBT has moved out of the post-go-live period of constant close monitoring and rapid issue resolution towards a business-as-usual position. Plans for future enhancements to the environment and the data behind it can now be reviewed, along with an assessment of the Trust’s future and the potential of reaching a similar outcome with NBT’s partner, UHBW, enabling both data teams to have the same view of data across Trusts and share it seamlessly. The project’s success also led to Andrew and his team being nominated by NBT’s Operations leadership for their annual staff award, an internal mark of excellence and recognition for a project well delivered.
Case study
Oxford Health save time and funding through detailed data analysis
Summary
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust operates across a large region of the South West of England providing physical, mental health and social care.
As a valued customer of CACI, we spoke to Head of Costing, Paul Vincent about some of the challenges his team faced and the improvements they’ve made through effective use of their costing solution Synergy 4.
Company size
10,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
The teams at Oxford Health were burdened with time consuming cost calculations that could only be produced at a high level – nowhere near their requirements for team and patient level activity-based costing.
Due to the work involved, Paul describes the costing process as being too admin heavy.
“Most of the costings were produced using excel and time was spent processing the data rather than analysing the data.”
Paul Vincent, Head of Costing, Oxford Health
When CACI were appointed, a key deliverable was to implement a solution that allowed Oxford Health to focus on data analysis in order to take actions to improve apportionment and allocation of money, as well as to kick start improving activity data by identifying gaps or lack of recording.
Solution
In order to meet the core requirements of an efficient alternative to costing calculations, as well as providing opportunities to analyse the data and gain insight, CACI’s proposed solution was Synergy4.
An NHSI Healthcare Costing Standards compliant, patient level costing solution for end-to-end reporting and management.
As one of the hurdles Oxford Health was facing was that they weren’t able to report at a detailed level, Synergy would help the trust overcome this challenge by allowing activity to be costed at the lowest level and mapping to the trust’s own user defined hierarches to produce the outputs they needed.
Paul told us this aspect has proven to be key for Oxford Health.
“The amount of detail that we can cost is extremely useful, if the activity data is robust, as we can cost by different criteria e.g. Referring GP and GP Practice, Consultant, Member of Staff that carried out the consultation, age and many more.”
Paul Vincent, Head of Costing, Oxford Health
Results
Since the implementation of Synergy4 Oxford Health have seen a number of improvements. The time saved on manual processing of the data mean they are now able to focus on data analysis and turn the insights into actions within the trust that directly impact funding.
Oxford Health continue work with CACI to maximise the benefits of Synergy and generate insights that help improve outcomes for staff and patients across the trust.
Case study
How Synergy4 simplified the merging of two Trusts into Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Summary
Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust is a provider of mental health, learning disability and community support services. Following the merging of the Trust with Dudley and Walsall Mental Health Trust in 2020, Black Country Healthcare Trust was tasked with combining two vastly different costing systems and strategies into a singular costing service and line reporting system. This proved to be no easy task, as Dudley and Walsall’s costing system was Synergy3, while Black Country Healthcare Trust had their own bespoke internal system. The differences between the Trusts’ costing of their services further amplified these difficulties. However, a pre-existing contract with CACI proved to be the key to streamlining this uniquely complex circumstance.
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
Merging two Trusts into one
This major change came with extensively different processes that had to be identified and differentiated. Unifying two teams also proved to be extraordinarily difficult for the Trust while keeping up with the demands of day-to-day tasks.
Learning a new system
The different systems that the Trusts were on and the necessity to quickly move to a new, singular system was a colossal change for the team, with its difficulties augmented by the substantial changes made to costing methodologies.
Adjusting cost centres within the Trust’s childhood account
This included adjusting the lengths, descriptions and meanings of the cost centres to ensure information remained correctly organised and that no information relating to either Trust was removed.
Maintaining cohesion while importing
When running imports through the Trust’s activity or costing data, ensuring all elements were executed sequentially proved to be difficult.
Solution
CACI equipped Black Country Healthcare Trust with Synergy4, a comprehensive patient level information and costing system specifically designed for the NHS. This system made the environment available for the Trust to work with two separate methodologies throughout the transitional merging period and securely organise pre-existing child accounts and allocation methods. Through Synergy4, the Black Country Healthcare Trust could deliver accurate patient-level costing and accurately report on findings. CACI was also tremendously understanding of the Trust’s unique merging circumstances, which simplified the complex transition of unifying two systems into one.
According to Mandip Bal, Lead Costing, Reporting and Finance Systems Accountant at Black Country Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, “The support and understanding offered by CACI was substantial, which enabled us to transition onto that new system.”
CACI supplied unwavering training and support to the Trust throughout the entire project and merger, ensuring that the Trust was well versed in Synergy4’s functions. This support was crucial for the effective translation of knowledge with consultants, which began with a paper written by CACI outlining how the costing journey would progress throughout the merger.
“Upon reading [this paper], I was in immediate agreement from our Trust,” Mandip explained. “We were able to confidently advise on the separation and visualise how the model would merge into one following the merging of the Trusts.”
Results
Operating two unique systems was highly complex, and the impact that CACI’s support had on the transition period and successful merging of the two Trusts did not go unnoticed by the wider business.
“Working with [CACI] is always very pleasant… The support available along with the helpdesk, especially at the project implementation stage, was helpful,” Mandip explained. “After we went live, the support desk was particularly helpful for the business. Whenever I’ve asked questions or enquired about different developments, CACI has always offered solutions or more information. I can deal with everything now through CACI, so quite a few efficiencies in terms of administrative tasks were achieved as well.”
The Trust now confidently runs a single system and has consistently met reporting and national costing deadlines as a result. Following updates made to the National Cost Collection guidance, CACI also ensured the Trust’s system was up to date to further assist with minute details amidst the transitional merging period.
Black Country Healthcare Trust is keen to explore new developments to Synergy4 as they become available and continue to receive CACI’s support to further enhance their system in the coming years.
Case study
How North Somerset Council has taken advantage of E Forms in ChildView
Summary
North Somerset Council has been using CACI’s ChildView since 2013. As part of its drive to derive more benefit from the system, the council began using ChildView’s E Forms functionality in 2022. Designed to give ChildView customers more flexibility in creating, linking and designing reports, E Forms enables councils and those tasked with improving outcomes for vulnerable young people to gain more insight into their work. Building up a database around youth justice work enables councils like North Somerset to gain deeper insight and understanding of their work.
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
“We made the decision to purchase the E forms module following the recent demonstration of its functionality to us by CACI,” says Nicola O’Driscoll, Principle Business Intelligence Lead at North Somerset Council. “The additional functionality gives us the ability to create and add our own forms and assessments, allowing North Somerset to report at a more granular level. As a result, this will aid effective targeting of resources, give greater management oversight, providing real depth and breadth of those risk and safeguarding factors that affect the children and young people we work with.”
Being more agile with the creation of forms and reporting enables youth justice workers to define the data that they need, not just work with pre-defined data capture fields. This helps teams research into and report on areas of their work in a more flexible manner.
Solution
Getting started with ChildView’s E Forms module was easy for North Somerset.
“In terms of the training the group experience was very diverse, from being highly experienced with the application to being novices,” explains Nicola. “All participants were able to follow the training and the feedback I have been given was “this was one of the best training sessions I have ever attended. The instructor was really clear and engaging and was able to answer every question. It was a really positive, inclusive experience. Following training there has been an incredibly high level of enthusiasm from everybody to get stuck in. Huge thanks to Carol, who was fantastic.”
Results
- Link forms together
- Create unique forms tailored to North Somerset Council’s bespoke process
- Locally designed forms that can be reported on
- Printable versions of each form.
Case study
How Mood helps NSCHT drive business value out of their information
Summary
North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare Trust (NSCHT) is a leading provider of mental health, social care, learning disability and substance misuse services in the West Midlands. It is one of only two specialist mental health Trusts rated ‘Outstanding’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
The Trust needed to improve the management, dissemination and availability of meeting outcomes, committee reports and project work. The Trust’s overall aim was summed up in the promotional strapline for the project: “All our actions. All our projects. All in one place.”
Company size
1,000 – 5,000
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
The Trust had a robust – albeit complicated – matrix of inputs/reporting from frontline managers into documentation in various formats. Directors and leaders (particularly executive directors) had to individually review Action Logs from Highlight Reports, Board Papers and Committee Assurance Reports to view the Trust’s management landscape.
As a result, two clear goals were set:
Increase the Trust’s efficiency
Enable faster achievement of the Trust’s core strategic objectives by reducing the incidence of missed or overdue actions
Solution
CACI’s Mood no-code software augmented NSCHT’s secure web access in the following critical ways:
It created an opportunity to develop functional solutions rapidly along with trial designs with users.
It offered the means to create interlocking functional “modules” and initiated the Trust’s building of three capabilities which formed the foundation of their new Unified Knowledge Layer (UKL):
- Meeting Manager
- Action Manager
- Personal Dashboard
Meetings are set up using Meeting Manager, where users can assign attendees, set out agendas and supply links to papers, allowing attendees to access everything they need in one location. Notes and actions can be captured during or after the meeting and are available to everyone. Actions can be assigned following the meeting and can be edited in Action Manager. Interested parties can then view the outcomes, papers and more in this single place, including browsing back to earlier meetings. Filters also allow for focus on a single meeting type, theme or even a single accountable owner.
Actions, whether from a meeting, project checkpoint or even a performance review can all be input directly into Actions Manager.
Alternatively, actions can be uploaded in bulk from a spreadsheet. Actions can be viewed through several filter-enabled lenses, such as an executive owner, action lead, topic, project, overdue, etc. They can be updated online and are visible instantly to all interested parties.
The Personalised Dashboard gives a user immediate visibility of all actions assigned to them. This presents a clear view of priorities so they can provide updates or delegate as necessary.
Added beneficial features include the solution’s Single Sign-On design, which links the Active Directory and removes the need to sign into UKL. It also includes Access Controls, where certain information can be available only to a restricted, need-to-know audience.
Results
- NSCHT is now equipped with new digital functionality and is currently implementing it across the wider organisation. The Trust regards the UKL as one of the primary choices for implementing new, digitised management information and intelligence – including upcoming new modules for stakeholder engagement and Active Listening.
- With fewer actions missed or completed late, various initiatives are now completed more efficiently, with less time spent on chasing updates. Management time is also more dedicated to items with the greatest priority and senior management are better able to gauge the landscape to assess the general health of activities.
- Mood’s no-code design helped the Trust rapidly design a prototype alongside key Trust staff and make it available for trial. While the solution was developed incrementally, user value was delivered from an early stage.
CACI has been delighted to work with NSCHT and enjoys the working relationship, leadership and creative input received from the NSCHT team throughout the process. The Trust’s leadership team is keen to continue broadening the use of UKL both through encouraging use by all staff and by extending functionality over the next few years into new modules delivering added capabilities.
Case study
How InView regenerated Croydon Health Services’ data capabilities
Summary
Croydon Health Services NHS Trust is a mid-sized hospital in Croydon that provides acute and community care through services and departments ranging from A&E, adult and paediatric critical care to outpatient and inpatient treatment and community services.
Prior to partnering with CACI over a decade ago, the Trust did not have their own data warehouse. Their in-house and bespoke systems were built using tools like Microsoft Access and SQL Server, which challenged their ability to load their structured data properly and time-efficiently. As a result, the Trust conducted a tender to enlist support for this, and after gauging the simplicity and ease with which CACI could help them meet their data warehouse optimisation needs, established a partnership.
Company size
4,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
Croydon Health Services’ entire in-house, bespoke system had been run by one person. This presented a risk to the organisation, particularly in the event of any changes made to statutory submissions or to the Healthcare Resource Group (HRG).
Husein Kermali, Head of Information Systems at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, explained the Trust’s thinking in opting for a more organised route that would guarantee their protection by working with an organisation as opposed to an individual to oversee the entire system.
“One of our reasons we chose to go with [an organisation-led] warehouse in the first place was so things like the HRG group, the statutory submissions and anything that comes online from us from an NHS perspective would be something that we knew that warehouse would be capable of delivering.”
Bespoke system only run by one person
At risk if any changes were made to statutory submissions or HRGs
Solution
The Trust implemented InView back in 2011-2012 as a one pass system. CACI created Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) processes through InView based on pre-existing system knowledge and an understanding of what Croydon Health Services endeavoured to do with their data from the point of partnership.
A few years later, in conjunction with their existing data provider, the Trust went from PIEDW extracts to Nautilus 835 extracts, which resulted in CACI taking over a significant amount of the ETL process for the Trust. The positive working relationship between the Trust and CACI built up the Trust’s confidence in the difference CACI could make for their data processing capabilities.
“We know that CACI is always there when we’ve got issues, we know that [CACI] knows the detailed processes very well. [CACI] also work for a multitude of Trusts… so they know they’ve seen all the issues that we’re having in other Trusts, and what all the Trusts are trying to do,” Husein explained. “I think with that kind of vision, [CACI] can see a lot more than we can. I think that makes CACI a great partner to be with.”
Results
When the CDS010 was retired and 011 E CDS came online a few years ago, Husein flagged that “if [the Trust] did that in-house, that would have been a lot of work.” According to Husein, CACI had the extracts ready for this through InView, CACI’s modular data platform, easing Croydon Health Services’ involvement in the process.
“With the simple product upgrade of InView, [CACI] had all the elements within their product already. We just had to populate the fields that we needed. The output that was delivered was then ECDS 011 compliant, which saved us a lot of time,” Husein continued. “[CACI] did all the testing… we just had to make sure that we filled in the elements that we needed for the easy desk submission, so that was amazing because it saved a lot of time.”
Croydon Health Services has also benefitted from being involved in the ETL process throughout its development by CACI. The supplementary documentation provided at the end of any piece of work with CACI has given the Trust unrestricted access to changes made through InView or ensuring that everything they wished to capture had indeed been included.
The Trust has applied their learnings from CACI’s processes to successfully implement their own data quality (DQ) reports and dashboards that highlight potential problems and look up issues through a warehouse load process. The processes followed by their Data Quality team have also ensured that when data now goes through to the data warehouse, those issues disappear.
Case study
How InView enhanced Stockport’s data collection & processing capabilities
Summary
When Stockport NHS Foundation Trust first looked to procure a data warehouse, they were adamant about choosing a provider with a proven track record and experience of delivering products and services to the NHS. Following recommendations and success stories from other users of CACI’s NHS data warehouse solution, InView, it was clear that a partnership with CACI would guarantee Stockport a smooth process with a mature and established provider.
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
Stockport needed one platform that would contain all data in one place to simplify the collection process and help the team regain control of their data. Over the years, numerous reporting database tables evolved to the point that multiple individual servers were created. This resulted in many duplications with multiple databases across multiple tables, data not being consolidated or structured, analysts having to work across servers and inconsistent information being produced. Having one unified platform would ensure that everyone would pull data from the same source and would avoid analysts working in silos and creating their own new sources of data. A consolidated data platform would provide much needed resilience and structure.
Stockport also wanted to take control of their statutory data processing and reporting. They needed flexibility and control over their own data developments, including more automated data submissions and reporting.
Simplify process by having one platform to host all data
Issues with duplications in the database
Need more control over data processing and reporting
Solution
CACI’s InView equipped Stockport with a mature data platform that has defined all statutory returns and commissioning datasets. It supports the team’s existing grouping and pricing processes and significantly reduces their month end manual processing, freeing up their time to dedicate their efforts to additional data analysis instead.
Through InView, the team also gained access to a unique support desk headed by a team of CACI’s technical experts, ensuring that any issues arising at Stockport could be mitigated precisely and timely.
“You don’t normally get someone that could just as easily have developed the product on a support line. [Our CACI support lead] knows InView inside out… not only does he know the products, but he also knows NHS data quite well,” Rory MacDonald, Lead Analyst at Stockport, explained.
“We have a lot of confidence in the fact that CACI’s [team of customer care individuals] understand NHS data and keep up to date on policy decisions to be able to respond quickly to changes,” Debbie Hope, Chief Data Officer at Stockport, continued.
Stockport was also able to identify gaps in the recording of patient observations, with a customised InView module specially developed by another one of CACI’s delivery support leads to enhance Stockport’s reporting capabilities. Through InView, the team could rest assured that all statutory elements would be addressed and that building any added functionalities within the platform would be done quickly and easily.
The latest enhancement that CACI’s delivery support lead is developing for Stockport is for their audiology data extraction and collection, whereby data is extracted from their system and data quality reports are being created to find any issues. This helps Stockport streamline some of their diagnostic waiting times reporting.
Results
According to Rory, CACI’s consultancy and support has far exceeded the organisation’s expectations. “The consultants were all really good in terms of both their technical expertise and dynamic advice,” he commented.
There was a noticeable reduction in the overall time spent processing overnight. After setting up a delta load, Stockport realised that every piece of information in their system dating back from the 1980s was being copied over. This process took progressively longer each day because the amount of data being copied over was continuously increasing. They worked with CACI on setting up a delta load where they could identify using interface messages, pull any necessary information and load it into the data warehouse, which significantly sped up the processing time.
“It’s available to be reported on from early in the morning,” Rory explained.
The enhanced data warehouse solution allowed Stockport to produce their own national CDS extracts. “We were reliant on and restricted to the pace of our PAS supplier previously for the development of those extracts when there were national changes,” Debbie explained. “We’ve removed that reliance and taken full control of those national extracts.”
Stockport was also able to move away from manually processing commissioner assignment within the PAS system. “It was a very manual process for using the contracting functionality within our patient administration system to assign the Commissioner for who pays for a particular piece of activity,” Rory explained. “Now that we’ve got all the national commissioner assignment method (CAM) rules written in the data warehouse, we’ve been able to switch off the functionality on the PAS system and transform the work of our data quality team.”
The Trust’s future ambitions include completely switching off all of the old servers with the legacy reporting databases so that the organisation can have only one development server and one production server for the data warehouse. They are also keen to increase the provision of real-time reporting. CACI will continue to support Stockport by analysing patient flow and frequently refreshing in-patient data to help Stockport understand exactly who is in the hospital at that time, what service they may be waiting for and how waiting times can be reduced, and overall support with the maintenance of their data warehouse.
Case study
Trust-wide insight for service improvement from Synergy 4 PLICS solution investment
Summary
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) is an NHS health and social care organisation that provides services in inpatient, community and primary care settings. The Trust’s services support adult mental health, older people and adults, and children, young people and families. Its biggest bases are the Cavell Centre in Peterborough and Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge, but its 4,000 staff are based in more than 50 locations, supporting a population of nearly one million people.
Company size
4,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Challenge
With new Patient-Level Information and Costings Systems (PLICS) regulations in force for Mental Health, CPFT needed to update its systems to comply. The Trust was in the process of implementing a new e-patient record system, so requested a PLICS deadline extension, which was granted.
Michelle Barnes, CPFT’s Assistant Director of Finance, explains: “We knew that the regulation would soon be extended to its community operations, so we decided to deploy a PLICS solution for both Mental Health and Community. We particularly wanted to find a system that felt intuitive to our team, so we could get the most value and efficiency from it.”
CPFT decided to replace its existing software outright, rather than upgrading it. The team selected CACI to integrate and implement our Synergy 4 patient level costing solution in a competitive process delivered through the NHS procurement framework.
System update in order to stay compliant
Intuitive system to achieve value and efficiency
Replacement of old system
Solution
Michelle Barnes says, “We had demonstrations of four different systems. We particularly liked the logic of Synergy 4 — it matched how we approach things in our day-to-day work. For example, it uses familiar language and terms in allocations and apportionments. Other systems that we reviewed seemed either too basic or too convoluted.”
Finance Assistant Michelle Clarke adds, “We had been using Excel for a lot of our costings, which had its limitations. Some of the solutions we evaluated were still spreadsheet-based — we wanted to move away from this to a specialist system. We liked the way the outputs were presented and being able to customise the dashboards, so we could choose what we wanted to see.”
Once CPFT had selected the CACI solution, CACI’s trainers booked in working sessions to upload data and support the CPFT team to embed their financial model. CACI delivered training on the features and functions of the system, in context of CPFT’s particular approach, and provided a high-level reference guide.
Michelle Barnes says, “CACI made us feel confident that they were on our wavelength whenever we asked questions about the system.”
Michelle Clarke agrees: “We worked with two different trainers, who were both really knowledgeable. They always understood what we needed – we felt the system was in our control from day one.”
Results
Synergy 4 provides granular, detailed and accurate information that CPFT can use in an intuitive and collaborative way across the Trust. Michelle Clarke affirms: “Synergy 4 gives us a lot more flexibility with the dashboards – we can share the information with clinical managers and show them the fluctuations, in more detail. You can customise it for wards, teams and communities. Before we only had average contact and bed days – now we can have much more detail when we talk about what services cost.
“Before, we basically divided total costs by the number of patients to calculate patient-level costings. Now, we have so much more scope to be detailed and to layer financial information with demographics and population data. For example, we can apply postcodes and look at metrics like staff downtime and travel time for patients.”
Michelle Barnes adds, “When we move into Critical Care boards, we’ll have to split our contract into two, for north and south. The extra information we can extract from PLICS at GP practice level will really help us see how to split that contract.”
Case study
Transforming Bupa’s customer journeys
Summary
Bupa was created in 1947 in the UK with the founding purpose to prevent, relieve and cure sickness and ill-health of every kind. The company is driven by a passion to provide high quality, affordable healthcare. Today, Bupa is an international healthcare company, providing health insurance, treatment in clinics, dental centres, hospitals and care homes.
Company size
10,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Services used
Challenge
Richard Glassborow is the Direct Distribution and Marketing Director for Bupa UK Insurance. He explains:
“Our challenge was no less than a marketing transformation. When I met with CACI a few months after taking up this role, I was looking for ways to transform our people, technology and data capabilities. Transforming our customer journeys was my top priority. We have a big customer base with many different journeys, from finding customers, bringing them into the funnel for conversion, on-boarding, renewing, retention and off-boarding, as well as managing claims. Customer expectations for personalised engagement are very high: they’re set by technology-led organisations like Amazon. In healthcare, we needed to raise our game.“
Complete marketing transformation
Improving people, technology and data capabilities
Solution
The end goal was to give Richard and his team a roadmap to transform customer journeys, alongside an assessment of current data and technology gaps.
Bupa had some challenges with lead conversion and retention, partly due to a lack of personalisation in their communications. For the transformation roadmap, CACI built a suite of private medical insurance (PMI) customer journeys for different life stages, then converted those into contact strategies which could be developed and activated through Bupa’s Adobe technology platform. They were designed to be engaging, timely and relevant.
CACI looked at the technology and data dependencies in context of Bupa’s existing and future resources, identifying the changes needed to give Bupa the customer experience capability it wanted. CACI’s consultants produced a recommended strategic solution to transform data and technology by upgrading Bupa’s IT architecture.
Results
Richard Glassborow is very pleased with the report and recommendations made by CACI, he explains:
“This work has created clarity instead of ambiguity. It has given us momentum and given our senior team the assurance to take the next step. The tactical steps we’ve identified are key to breaking down barriers to change: we now have a credible plan to address them, so everyone is confident that the transformation is feasible.”
CACI is a preferred partner to Bupa for technology and implementation. The teams are working together on several strategic projects, including the single customer view, marketing distribution technology, and this infrastructure solution.
Case study
Consistent field force solutions with industry-leading ROI for a global group
Summary
A global provider of outsourced sales and marketing solutions for retailers and consumer goods companies, Advantage Smollan helps brands and retailers win at the point of purchase. Its services include field sales, brand activation, merchandising, retail audits, data analytics and technology solutions, all of which help enhance brand visibility, drive revenue growth and optimise in-store execution. With varied working practices and technology across Europe, the group needed a consistent field force solution that could enable it to grow its customer base in-market and across borders.
Company size
10,000+
Industry
Professional Services
Products used
Challenge
To create technology support for the core service, which is consistent across all markets.
Having grown largely through acquisition, Advantage Smollan was enjoying great success with its Europe-wide model offering sales and marketing solutions to retailers and CPG brands in 12 countries.
Yet, many of these companies had brought their own ways of working and legacy technology with them when acquired by the group, complicated by the fact each client challenge varies hugely by market.
As a result, it was difficult for the Advantage Smollan’s team to achieve consistency in what they deliver and measure between markets, and to implement multi-market projects across borders.
They needed a field force solution that could provide this operational consistency and – critically – maximise ROI in the process.
Solution
Having worked with Advantage Smollan’s UK business for 15 years, CACI was well placed to work with the global team to implement its InSite FieldForce and CallSmart solutions to help optimise sales and staffing resources.
A critical requirement for the solution was that the Advantage Smollan team needed to know which stores to visit and when, plus have access to the latest data, enabling them to react quickly to support sales and promotional activity in-store.
CACI processed the data to ensure the call-file — with details of calls made by field agents helping track and optimise operations in the field — was updated overnight.
They also ensured that sales teams’ routes were optimised dynamically, to make sure the Advantage Smollan team were able to visit the stores that had the highest sales potential.
Results
At CACI, we have been able to help Advantage Smollan achieve industry-leading ROI targets regularly, enabling the team to do — and win — business with customers based on delivering enhanced performance and value, by proving that they can identify the single most efficient way to deploy field force across multiple countries — a unique proposition across the European market.
The InSite FieldForce and CallSmart solution has supported the Group with promotional compliance consistency, making efficiency improvements even on projects with 98% promotional compliance levels.
It also introduced a move towards dynamic qualifying — continuously assessing and adjusting the criteria for qualifying leads or tasks based on real-time data and changing circumstance — so that their teams can visit the right stores where their teams will make the most sales.
Advantage Smollan is so pleased with CACI’s InSite FieldForce and CallSmart solutions that it introduced CACI to its international partners. The consistency provided by the field force solution means they can use group-wide KPIs and create benchmarks that optimise their salesforce activities in emerging and developed markets.
Learn more about FieldForce and CallSmart.
Case study
How Roche diversified international clinical trials through demographic and health variable data
Summary
For international pharmaceutical and diagnostics company, Roche, a core function of the organisation is the running of clinical trials for regulatory approval of new medications. In particular, the insights and analytics team is involved in supporting late-stage trials by identifying the most appropriate hospital locations and clinical trial patients for these trials across countries, to enable the most effective recruitment process.
Company size
10,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products Used
Challenge
Diversity
Historically, clinical trial populations have often differed from the populations that use the medications, resulting in clinical trial patients being predominantly Caucasian and coming from more affluent socioeconomic backgrounds.
Regulation
Regulations are evolving and regulatory agencies are driving a new view on diversity and inclusion in clinical trials.
Data
Lack of data availability, legal barriers, data collection and protection and privacy issues are all common hurdles in clinical trials, especially in Europe.
Solution
By working with CACI, Roche’s insights and analytics team has used a combination of demographic and health variable data within CACI’s analytical and mapping tool, InSite, to determine locations that would best suit the recruitment of more diverse populations for clinical trials in five European markets.
With diversifying clinical trials being the team’s goal, the key variables it needed to understand included ethnicity, deprivation, education attainment, economic status, rural versus urban, smoking, pollution and other disease risk factors. CACI developed bespoke models for these variables by combining key demographics such as age, income and gender with survey data on a country-by-country basis to generate models at a postcode level for each of the required countries.
Results
Roche’s insights and analytics team has benefitted from CACI’s bespoke model and expertise, delivering the model to the team and providing training on how to use it. The team has since been able to use data-driven decision making to tackle any clinical trial strategy obstacles versus relying on assumption.
Having previously worked with CACI on smaller, UK-focused projects, the ability to now take this bespoke model to scale so that it can be accessed across other countries has augmented Roche’s diversity strategy. The team has been particularly pleased by CACI’s quick data generation and innovation in terms of modelled data from survey data sources.
