Greater East Midlands CSU visualises BI

Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit has integrated a data visualisation tool into its business intelligence platform.

The CSU recently created the ‘Greater East Midlands Information, Management and Analysis’ platform, known as GEMIMA.

And it has now deployed visual analytics to allow staff to compare data across all clinical commissioning groups quickly and accurately.

The platform and the Tableau visual analytics software mean the CSU, which serves more than 20 CCGs, can contrast performance and resource management both locally and nationally.

Dave Marsden, director of informatics and IT services at the CSU, told EHI that GEMIMA platform gives analysts access to a range of data.

“We are able to provide benchmarking information across the East Midlands and across the country. Staff are able to compare themselves to others in the patch, regionally and nationally,” he said.

He added that the visualisation tool makes it easier to view and make sense of the data.

“We have a strong track record for innovation, and have harnessed the latest technologies on the GEMIMA platform to provide customers with a secure, accessible tool to review, share and interpret reliable and timely data sources,” he added.

“Empowering our analysts with data visualisation technology will make a tangible difference to their work, and in the future we are looking at extending the capability to our customers.”

The CSU has also done a series of pieces of work to make sure the quality of the data is up to scratch.

“We put a lot of effort into the dashboards in terms of data quality. We do a lot of pre-processing before we put it into our data warehouse,” said Marsden.

“The more you expose data quality challenges, the greater buy-in you get.  We’re also talking about introducing incentives in to improve data quality.”

The CSU will roll out the visualisation tool on the platform in a phased implementation which began this month.