PathAnalyse: Towards the redesign of outpatient services using visual process analytics Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Time-to-treatment is key to better health outcomes for patients, but long waiting times are a reality, appointments are often missed, and burnout is a risk for health care professionals.

Although digitisation has the potential to optimise health care delivery, the analytical capability needed to derive benefit from the growing volume of data is lacking.

This project aimed to advance analytical capability using PathAnalyse – a tool to improve health care delivery using visual data analytics. This built on previous digitisation efforts from the Trust’s Scientific Computing and Informatics team to develop PathFinder, a workflow system that tracks the patient’s clinical journey.

PathAnalyse supports senior staff to understand their operations and identify when poor patient experience and resource inefficiencies occur. The project involved taking a prototype version of PathAnalyse and developing a working product that could be used by the Trust to explore real-world problems by an analytics team.

In addition, software has been developed that has allowed more flexibility than first intended, including enabling connectivity to a number of data sources, allowing integration of records from different sources, and de-identification of the data so that it can be shared with third parties.

The applicability of the tool has been demonstrated with data from emergency services and clinical coding episodes within the hospital. The resulting analyses and visualisations of the data have been insightful and engaging for the end users, which has demonstrated the value of this methodology and the tools developed as part of the project.

Contact information

For more information about this project, please contact Steven Wood, Clinical Scientist, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.