Liverpool Primary Care Trust makes business intelligent

In this video case study, managers from Liverpool Primary Care Trust talk about the benefits of a web-based business intelligence (BI) solution built around Microsoft technologies by Ardentia. NetMetrics allows managers to see information about key targets and financial indicators on dashboards that they can tailor to their own requirements.

Liverpool Primary Care Trust has a pressing need for information. As chief executive Derek Campbell explains, the purpose of the PCT is to “improve the health and wellbeing of the whole population” in the most optimal way possible, within its resources.

To do this, the PCT needs to measure “health gain”, to track its progress against local and national targets and to manage its budgets in year.

Or, as finance director Phil Wadeson says: “We are continually faced with prioritising between competing demands and making informed choices about what we do with our resources.

“So managers at all levels in the organisation need to clearly understand whether they are delivering and how the overall organisation is performing.” And to do this they need business intelligence (BI).

Developing NetMetrics

The PCT decided it needed to improve its management of information back in 2005. It worked with BI experts Ardentia to create web-based system that delivers information to “dashboards” that allow staff to see at a glance how they are performing against key indicators.

“The technology platform we used was Microsoft SQL Server,” says Gary Luke, managing director of Ardentia, “and the tool we built ourselves [is] called NetMetrics. [It] allows for performance indicators to be defined and monitored in an intuitive and easy manner [integrating] information from multiple-sources.”

Using tailor-made dashboards

The system can be tailored towards the needs of each user. This is important because, as Caroline Round points out, the system contains more than 80 indicators and there is a danger of “data overload.”

“The facility is there to customise your own dashboard with just a few key indicators or to look at some pre-populated dashboards,” she says.

Ewan Wilkinson, a consultant in public health, says he finds the system “very helpful” because it gives him a “clear overview” of the different indicators that he needs to monitor.

For instance, he can see at a glance whether patients who suffer suspected heart attacks are being given “clot busting” drugs within the target “door to needle time” and investigate any problems that show up with trusts.

Fit for the future

Liverpool PCT is also working with trusts to develop indicators that will show the costed value of their activity to support the new financial regime, Payment by Results.

But more and more money is being held by GPs as a result of the move towards Practice based Commissioning. “The Ardentia system can be accessed by GPs and by consortium leads,” says Mr Wadesdon.

“Because it is a web-based system, rather than take the system out and install it, all we need to do is to issue a user-name and a password. So we can use the system to scale and flex not just our current needs but those of the PCT into the future.”

• See the video, produced by GBTV
• Find out more about Ardentia and NetMetrics at Ardentia's website