Yellowfin’s Business Intelligence solution to help NHS boost patient care

SOURCE: Yellowfin

Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, a provider of mental health and community care services in Lancashire under England’s National Health Service (NHS), has today announced a partnership with global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics vendor, Yellowfin.

The partnership will see the Trust – the largest provider of mental health and community care services in Lancashire, and one of the biggest in England – utilise Yellowfin’s Mobile BI capabilities to deliver reporting and analytics to its 6000 field based clinicians.

Due to Lancashire Care’s goal of democratizing its data – making it available to its broad range of services personnel – attaining a cost effective BI solution was important.

“It quickly became apparent how expensive most Business Intelligence solutions were to roll-out across large organisations,” said Lancashire Care Director of Finance, Dave Tomlinson.  “We wanted a solution which could start small and then be scaled up without giving us headaches about cost.  With Yellowfin’s value for money pricing structure, we knew we could do just that.”

Independent data access and analysis on-the-go

Field-based clinicians can now independently access and share the information they need to boost individual and collective performance, as well as improve the quality and efficiency of patient care.

“Previously, the Trust’s community services staff worked remotely via a paper-based diary system of record keeping,” said Lancashire Care Business Intelligence Manager, Mark Singleton.  “With Yellowfin, our services staff can enhance the care they provide, by independently accessing personalised patient and performance data directly from their tablet devices in real-time, wherever and whenever necessary.”

After evaluating a number of BI solutions for mobile devices, Lancashire Care identified Yellowfin as “the easiest to use”, making information “highly consumable through its interactive charts and dashboards”, via native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Android platforms, Web-browser or HTML 5 integration.

“When evaluating the different Mobile BI solutions on the market, I often found that each product would have its own strengths, but would come with equal weaknesses,” said Singleton.  “However, Yellowfin was different.  No matter how hard I challenged and pushed the product, it always delivered.”

Beyond Mobile BI: Enhanced management visibility

Whilst Lancashire Care originally began evaluating Yellowfin for its Mobile BI proficiency, the Trust quickly found its core Web-based application was also highly intuitive within a desktop-oriented environment.

“What started as a Mobile BI evaluation soon got me re-thinking our desktop strategy,” said Singleton.  “We’re now moving our existing desktop reporting over to Yellowfin.  Like Gartner, I can see this emerging technology going far in the market, and that’s why we’ve decided to back it early.”

Using Yellowfin, the Trust has also developed a Balanced Scorecard – pulling together clinical, financial, human resources and quality control information – to provide Trust executives, management and Board of Directors a comprehensive picture of current Trust performance.

“Enabling management with more timely and accessible information will improve efficiency, performance and most importantly quality within the Trust,” said Tomlinson.  “Yellowfin – with its commentary, discussion and PowerPoint-like presentation module, Storyboard – is a perfect BI tool for management.  Extra insights from across the organizations can be added to raw figures, to help the Trust’s knowledge grow quicker and deeper than ever before.”

Improved IT efficiencies

As a 100 percent Web-based BI solution, Yellowfin has allowed Lancashire Care to create a single trustworthy source of information for its reporting.  Lancashire Care’s BI team can confidently re-use previously created content, enabling new dashboards to be built and published within minutes, rather than hours or days.

“Previously I found the development team creating similar reports with very slight variations,” said Singleton.  “Eliminating this unnecessary duplication of efforts, and improving reporting efficiencies, is going to be essential with increasing demand for our BI services in challenging economic times.”

Yellowfin and healthcare analytics

Speaking about the newly formed partnership, Yellowfin Strategic Alliances Manager EMEA, Daniel Shaw-Dennis, said that attracting the NHS as a client demonstrated Yellowfin’s continued commitment to providing highly consumable analytics to the healthcare industry.

“At Yellowfin, we understand the important role that analytics can play in the healthcare sector, with clients spread across the globe – from health insurance to hospitals,” said Shaw-Dennis.  “We look forward to assisting the NHS, and Lancashire Care in particular, to improve operational efficiencies so that patients can receive the best care possible.”

About Lancashire Care

Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust was established in April 2002 and authorised as a Foundation Trust on 1st December 2007. The Trust provides health and wellbeing services for a population of around 1.5million people.

The services provided include community nursing, health visiting and a range of therapy services including physiotherapy, podiatry and speech & language. Wellbeing services provided include smoking cessation and healthy lifestyle services.

The Trust specialises in inpatient and community mental health services. Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust covers the whole of the county and employs around 7,000 members of staff across more than 400 sites.

About Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) software vendor passionate about making BI easy. Yellowfin is headquartered and developed in Melbourne, Australia, offering a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution. Founded in 2003 in response to the complexity and costs associated with implementing and using traditional BI tools, Yellowfin is a leader in mobile, collaborative and embeddable BI as well as Location Intelligence and data visualization. For more information, visit www.yellowfinbi.com

For further media information, interviews, images or product demonstration, please contact:

• * Katie Stephenson, Communications Manager, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust on +44 01772 695368 or Katie.Stephenson@LancashireCare.nhs.uk
• * Lachlan James, Communications Manager, Yellowfin on +61 3 8617 4954 or lachlan.james@yellowfin.bi

Please direct any technical product enquiries to Yellowfin International Pty Ltd via lachlan.james@yellowfin.bi.  For customer interviews and information please contact Katie.Stephenson@LancashireCare.nhs.uk.

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