Data Scientists at the Hartree Centre North East Hub developed an interactive visualisation tool with Floki Health to simplify complex data and to allow medical staff find assets quickly and easily.

Challenge

There are often not the right number of medical devices in the right locations within hospitals, and this wastes NHS time and money. Floki Health have developed an online Asset Management tool for medical devices to help medical staff find equipment. Floki wanted to be able to determine the optimal level of devices needed for a consistent service at a particular location to simplify the service and support automation of the solution. As a company, they are bound by the same NHS mantra of “making a difference to the lives of patients and clinicians”.

Approach

The Hartree Centre North East Hub team worked with Floki to create an interactive visualisation tool which simplifies their complex data and enables issues to be quickly identified. Following the visualisation stage, an optimisation approach was designed which takes into account the number of detected assets of a given type across the hospital and recommends a better distribution of these assets, based on user defined parameters. The output of this optimisation is then passed to an interface which allows the user to decide how to move from the current distribution of assets to an optimised distribution, by creating actions which move devices from one location to another.

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Benefits

Using the prototype that has been developed, Floki will be able to demonstrate the potential of their solution to NHS Trusts. Adoption of the optimisation approach will lead to better management of assets and therefore less time spent searching for devices which are not in the places they are needed. This will ultimately result in improved patient care and better utilisation of resources. Floki have also benefitted from learning new skills related to version control, data pipelines, and visualisation, which are transferable to new projects. A range of viable future directions were identified, and Floki is looking to explore these in subsequent data projects.

“Hartree Centre North East Hub helped us to unlock the value and power of our data through a combination of visualisation and optimisation. We are now looking to pilot the prototype tool with an NHS Trust soon and gather feedback for further development. Actionable Insights have always been our goal and this project has accelerated us towards that goal faster than we could ever have imagined.”

- Fenwick Smith, Floki Health

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Further Information

This work was completed as part of one of our collaborative data projects. The projects are up to 12 weeks in duration and give you access to a wide range of expertise across our team of data scientists and data engineers. We will work alongside your team to scope your data science or engineering project, build a prototype solution, and explore options to deploy it within your organisation. You can learn more about them on our webpage here.

If you would like to learn more about the Hartree Centre North East Hub or our collaborative data projects, please get in touch with us at: hello@hartreenortheast.uk