Tower Hamlets PCT

Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust reduces Two-Day Practice-Based Commissioning reporting task to 50 minutes! PBC Reports help GPs budget for hospital services.

It took Tower Hamlets PCT two days to prepare GPs' practice-based-commissioning reports for 38 General Practices; using the Monarch report-mining and analytics tool, any member of the IT department can complete the job within one hour.

"It is so easy to do now," comments Carol McGuinness, Senior IT Analyst at Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust (PCT).

Primary Care Trusts in England are required to provide detailled information to GP practices that will enable them to verify the secondary care (hospital and consultant) costs allocated to them each month and year-to-date. Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust wanted to begin delivering reports to its GPs as early as possible in 2006.

The source information was available in an enormous Access report but it was not possible easily to integrate the data into single tables. So the first PBC reports were less detailed than the reports the PCT can now deliver using Monarch, but the first month's reports still took two days of detailed, painstaking work to prepare. This was impractical.

The IT department then investigated Monarch, the leading report-mining and analysis solution from Datawatch, and turned the two-day task that could be completed in under an hour.

"It is an easy task now. Datawatch Europe's trainer built an automated data-extraction process for us," comments Carol McGuinness, Senior IT Analyst at Tower Hamlets PCT, "so that we were able to get started straight away and he also trained us so that we can change the reports or process whenever we need."

Anyone who needs to 'mine' reports or extract and analyse information contained in existing documents, no matter what size or how many there are, or indeed what type they are, faces a tough challenge - unless the organisation uses Monarch, the report mining and analytic tool. Monarch meets almost any report-mining challenge.

Read more about Tower Hamlet PCT's use of Monarch in a case study or request it by calling 01752 893100 or email sales@datawatch-europe.com for more details.