Delegates were today shown how business intelligence tools inform operational decision making with a tour of Christchurch Hospital’s Operations Centre, the new cutting edge facility which could claim to be the nerve centre for Canterbury’s health system.

Presenter Trevor Read, the Global Director of Clinical Services for Lightfoot Solutions, and Production Engineer Ian Shields took the first group of delegates behind the scenes this morning.

Ian explained to them how data on availability and pressures on different resources in the Canterbury health system are fed into the operations centre before tools are overlaid to present the data and push it back out to key clinical staff - who see the data in touchscreens in their ward - so they can then improve the way they manage patient care.

He showed that everyone in the health system has access to the data via an intranet site and stressed the importance of transparency for making the system work.

"We us SCRUM boards to show what is not working. This makes the issues visible so you can then have a conversation and start talking about what is not working," Ian said.

 "If you can't see something, you don't know that it's there. I would encourage everyone working in a health system to make everything as visible as they can."

  Crunching the numbers: Trevor Read, the Global Director Clinical Services for Lightfoot Solutions,
takes delegates through the inner workings of the Christchurch Hospital Operations Centre.

Trevor then took over from Ian to drill down into many of the statistics being shown on the operation centre's live screens. He pointed out how data, such as ED availability, is broken down into the important steps of patient management in a clinical episode of care.

However, he also emphasised how proactive the system is, allowing decision makers to better meet targets by seeing where they can optimise their processes.

"We are not just reporting on systems. This is about 'Is the organisation making the changes that need to be made?'," he said.

"This is about continuous improvement."

The metrics associated with a pathway show those at a high level in the health system what is and isn't working.

"If it's not working, we can take it off. But if it is working, we can bottle it and see how it can be applied elsewhere."

The visit to Christchurch Hospital was followed by a stop at Streamliners’ new writing HQ, where Regional Group Manager Graeme Wilson briefed delegates on the systems used to publish HealthPathways before they got the chance to meet their technical writing teams face-to-face for the first time.

 Streamliners Regional Group Manager Graeme Wilson giving delegates a brief glimpse of the backend of HealthPathways.

 Meeting your technical writer: Each regional team spent 20-30 minutes discussing issues and processes with Streamliners staff.