PBL Care, a Birmingham based SME, is a domiciliary care service, providing a wide range of care and support services tailored to each individual patient’s requirements. Providing care services requires strict quality assurance measures to ensure users consistently receive the care they need.
Abdel-Rahman Tawil, Associate Professor in Software Engineering and Xavier Schmoor, Doctoral Researcher from Birmingham City University have been working with PBL Care to develop a data-driven solution.
The solution monitors care services provided to patients through an interactive dashboard, showing data such as the duration of calls/visits, types of services given on each visit, and any concerns a carer might have about a patient. Ultimately, the system provides quality assurance, as well as increased customer satisfaction and health.
The challenge – keeping track of patient well-being across the client base
Digital record keeping is a challenge across healthcare systems in the UK; even the NHS isn’t fully digital, with plans to completely digitise by 2023.
As a healthcare provider, PBL Care also faced the reality of being reliant on a paper-based records system. This ultimately made it more difficult to actively monitor the care they were providing and meant it was harder to keep track of any improvement or decline in patient care.
The SME needed to digitise, but further to that, they needed a way to ensure that the patient records being promptly produced were adequately analysed, allowing for reflection, monitoring and improvement of services. Data such as patient/ carer contact time, number of patients’ visits per week and records of what those visits entailed are vital to businesses like PBL Care, as they are indicators of the service level their clients are receiving. Closely monitoring this data allows for better quality assurance across the business and, most importantly, improves the lives of the patients.
The delivery – creating a data-driven dashboard
Xavier and Abdel provided PBL Care with the software engineering and big data know-how to reach a data analytics driven solution. The project leads from Birmingham City University guided PBL Care through the digitising process by providing data models that would work with interactive dashboards. Once this data was digitised, a prototype dashboard was created and was further refined for PBL Care’s needs. This solution can be filtered and adapted to show PBL Care the data they need to inform their decision making in a clear and visual way. Now, the business can see their entire care provision across all users and also review an individual user's needs.
PBL Care is using the developed data management solution to show real business and community impact in their yearly inspection with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), where the dashboard could potentially aid them in attaining a higher rating. The system also allows the SME to demonstrate successes and budget outcomes to their funders, clearly demonstrating how fund allocation has led to better care.
Success to date
PBL Care now has a solution to visually monitor and analyse the health data and care provision of all their patients more effectively, enabling them to take necessary action more quickly. With the provided solution, they hope to improve their rating with the CQC as they are able to show their impact and also demonstrate that they are hitting their quality assurance targets.
Looking to the future
This system can be implemented by other businesses or health organisations that provide care services. Abdel, Xavier and the team plan to continue working with PBL Care and are working on the development of a mobile app, which will be used to collect data from the carers during each callout. This data could also be informative for the patients as they would have a full view of their care provision, thus further improving customer satisfaction.
Big Data Corridor: A New Business Economy
This project is co-funded by the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund. Project No 12R16P00220
