3rd May 2023
“How effective is the current system at preventing and treating strokes?” – this was the key question we sought to answer when we developed an interactive dashboard in Hereford and Worcestershire. Our team of experts bring a wide range of skills and experience to meet our clients needs. We used our analytics expertise to support Herefordshire and Worcestershire (H&W) ICS to develop an interactive dashboard as part of their quality outcome framework for the stroke pathway.
The Challenge
The client approached the TU to develop a quality outcomes framework for the Stroke Pathway in H&W. They wanted to:
- understand how well the Integrated Care System (ICS) performed in preventing and treating strokes both as a system, and in comparison, to other systems and national averages
- be able to understand the ICS performance by different demographics, and different geographies – so for example by age and by neighbourhood (where someone lived)
- from a population health perspective, better understand the prevalence of the disease, the risks, the treatment received from secondary and acute providers, and mortality.
The client provided important existing work that helped us to develop the framework. This included an existing needs analysis. We also held engagement sessions that enabled us to use their knowledge and experience of the stroke pathway itself. This helped us to better understand the client’s requirements.
Our Approach
Our analysts worked closely with the client to plan, develop and agree a set of metrics for this dashboard. We achieved this through a series of interactive meetings, walking the client through the dashboard as it progressed. This helped us to get timely feedback, make improvements and ultimately deliver the client’s requirements. The metrics measured the performance across the stroke pathway as well as the key population health demographic and health indicators. Our analysts used the agreed dashboard tool to transform the data into visualisations that were easy to understand and demonstrated the agreed metrics.
Whilst our main deliverable was to build the dashboard, we also felt that it was important to equip the client with skills to develop the dashboard further if they had the need to. To achieve this we:
- used code that was easy to re-produce
- wrote a detailed handover document
- held an accessible hand over meeting to go through the documents and answer further questions from the client
The main task involved dashboard design and development. The dashboard included 22 data sources and 49 visualisations across 19 dashboard pages. We used a range of different outputs, including geospatial mapping, bar charts, line graphs and pie charts. The dashboard is interactive, it enables the user to select different variables to look at different population groups and geographies. The design uses the colour scheme and visuals from the H&W ICS website and the dashboard includes numerous interactive buttons and filters to optimise the user experience.
The Outcome
The TU presented the dashboard to the H&W Stroke Board and the board provided positive feedback. The Stroke Board will use the dashboard to inform the development of the quality outcomes framework for the Stroke pathway. This in turn will help to support the continuous improvement cycle and help to deliver better Stroke services to those who need them.