NHS trust picks BusinessObjects to drive self-service analytics

03.11.2012
North London NHS Trust, Royal Free, is implementing SAP's BusinessObjects in a bid to improve data reporting and analytics, whilst driving more responsibility to end-users, who will be able to interact and analyse the data themselves.

Royal Free handles approximately 750,000 visitors each year and collects swathes of data on patients, interactions with patients, clinical data, test data, and contracting data.

Will Smart, director of information management and technology at Royal Free, spoke to Computerworld UK about how the Trust is trying to better use this data to improve productivity.

"The way our reporting teams have tended to work in the past is in what I would describe as a cottage industry approach - where each report is lovingly hand-crafted using Excel and Access. Beautifully bespoke," said Smart.

"The first requirement we had was to put a tool in place that could help manage the complexity of the NHS' data definition. To help structure the data coming out of the repositories. The second requirement was to automate the routine reporting and not have expensive analysts spending their time producing report after report," he added.

"The third was to put tools in that would allow the end users to interact with their own data, so that they could actually drive value out of the data themselves and then come back to the central team as a more intelligent customer of our services."