Work

Mapping a route to a state-of-the-art healthcare intelligence system

The Opportunity

Successful implementation of any significant modernisation project requires careful planning and a tightly-scoped discovery phase to ensure that an organization is addressing the right challenges and building the appropriate solutions.

Public Health England (disbanded in 2021, with functions divided between UKHSA and OHID) collects and analyses huge amounts of data to shape strategic healthcare decisions, aimed at protecting the nation’s wellbeing. Recent initiatives underpinned by PHE data include the ‘sugar tax’ and the antimicrobial resistance strategy, which has led to fewer antibiotics being prescribed by GPs.

To support better and faster decision-making, PHE wanted to ensure it was making the most of modern analytics tools and data science approaches. It also wanted to improve data sharing and collaboration between teams working on different areas of population health, potentially by putting in place an organisation-wide Population Health Intelligence System (PHIS).

To inform the business case for a PHIS it needed to identify where it could improve the way it worked with data, potential enhancements and their benefits and the cost-effectiveness of those enhancements.

Our Approach

The breadth of stakeholders who would use a PHIS meant our user researchers gathered a large and exceptionally diverse range of requirements. Bringing this together to create a coherent way forward was one of the biggest challenges of this discovery.

We needed to provide next steps and technology architecture designs with sufficient detail to underpin a strong business case, while ensuring these were flexible enough to meet such broad needs. A data and analytics platform that worked the same way for everyone wouldn’t be suitable.

Following detailed analysis by our user researchers and data science teams, we produced:

Personas
Analysis of key themes spanning all personas
Outline functional and non-functional requirements
User stories related to these requirements
Conceptual architecture, indicating the nature of a future PHIS
Proposed alpha workstreams
Overview of alpha timeline, budget, delivery team and PHE stakeholder involvement

The Impact

Our findings underpinned the business case to proceed with alpha, while the personas we developed had an immediate impact in other parts of the organisation.

We gave Public Health England a clear way forward for the development of its new Population Health Intelligence System, ensuring this would meet the exceptionally diverse needs of its broad user base.

Dr Julian Flowers, Head of Public Health Data Science at PHE, reflects: “The Softwire discovery process was even more useful than we’d expected, because it moved us on further than we’d anticipated.

“Firstly, Softwire got through a lot of people in a short space of time. And secondly, they translated these user needs into a system map and requirements. This has been crucial in our next set of business cases.

“Softwire provided a balance of digital experience and data know-how. This was important because we’re linking this work with an in-house, digitally oriented data project, and needed people who’d be able to work closely with us. This collaboration went really well, and Softwire’s work with our digital team has been really important in getting the PHIS project moving.”

“ The Softwire discovery process was even more useful than we’d expected, because it moved us on further than we’d anticipated.

Dr Julian Flowers, Head of Public Health Data Science at PHE

Our Work