Using data to help answer questions and make decisions
Appointment Scheduling Software
PIE CHART example
You manage a team of 6 health visitors.
Due to budget cuts your team has been allocated a new area to cover.
You want to know how much extra work this will be.
Look at the recorded DATA
Record keeping is important in the NHS.
When your organisation keeps data, you can look for patterns and make predictions.
You look at the previous year’s data for this new area.
You are interested in the number of visits made (3672).
It’s about the same as the number your team did last year (3708).
It is reasonable to predict that your team’s workload will double.
Ask for additional resources
You now have data to support a request for additional resources on the basis that the team’s existing workload is about to double.
The team currently has 6 health visitors. You ask for 6 more.
You should always ask, even in situations where budgets are being cut.
It’s a reasonable request if you have data to support what you are saying.
Your request is partially successful.
Your team gets 2 more health visitors.
You had 6, you now have 8.
It was worth asking even though you may not have been expecting to get any new staff due to the situation being part of overall budget cuts to the service.
Each health visitor on your team makes up their own list of daily appointments from a master list.
You previously worked as a health visitor in this area. It’s rural and a lot of time is spent driving from client to client.
It might be possible to better organise and allocate the team’s daily appointments so that each health visitor would have less driving to do and might fit in more
appointments.
Look for existing methods or solutions that might help your situation You do some research and find that supermarkets have a computer software programme which uses locations and times to optimise routes for deliveries to their shops.
Ask for a demo and a trial before you commit to a purchase
You contact the software company and request a trial version of the software to see if it could also be used to schedule health visitor appointments.
The software supplier offers to come and set up their software and let your team use it (for free) for a one month trial.
Did it work? Using data (and the team’s opinion) to evaluate a trial
You need to be able to make a comparison of what it was like without the software and what happened when the software was used.
There are two parts to this
• you must keep records so you’ve “before” and “after” data to compare
• you also ask the team and see what they say – they’re the ones using it
Here is the team data for the 3 months immediately before when the team of 6 health visitors were still organising their own appointments from the daily list, and the 1 month after when the expanded team of 8 were trialling the software.
BEFORE AFTER
Health Travel Admin Visiting Health Travel Admin Visiting Visitor (hours) (hours) (hours) Visitor (hours) (hours) (hours)
A 149 47 186 A 32 21 83
B 80 25 100 B 35 23 90
C 163 51 204 C 34 22 87
D 120 38 150 D 25 16 64
E 108 34 135 E 23 15 59
F 60 19 75 F 22 14 57
G (NEW) 27 18 70
H (NEW) 20 13 52
It’s hard to make a direct comparison.
BEFORE is data for 6 people for 3 months. AFTER is 8 people for 1 month covering a bigger area.
What did the team say?
• they each felt they were doing more admin than before
More admin (bad) but think this through. If the appointments are better organised and each team member is getting a list where the clients are
geographically closer together, less time is wasted driving from client to client.
You need to ask them if this could be what’s happening. Is the extra admin because they’re doing more appointments in a day?
• their working day felt less rushed
they didn’t feel as rushed with clients because the next appointment was often close by and not a long drive away
You ask them, if you could get some additional funding to pay for the software, would they use it? Do they want you to try to do that?
They collectively agree that they want to continue using the software if that’s an option.
Purchasing the software
You had the software for a 1 month free trial. You need to buy it. This may mean writing a report to justify the purchase. The report needs to include data which demonstrates how the software makes the team more effective.
You have “before” and “after” data but it isn’t a straightforward comparison.
• the team sizes are different (6 before, 8 after)
• the lengths of time are different (3 months before, 1 month after)
• the areas covered are different
The reason we use graphs and charts and diagrams is that sometimes it’s much easier to see what’s going on (in the right kind of graph, chart or diagram) than looking at a lot of numbers in tables.
This is one of the situations.
Using two PIE CHARTS to compare the TOTALS
Instead of looking at individual health visitors, add up the columns and look at the team totals from the 3 months before and the 1 month after.
BEFORE Travel Admin Visiting
(hours) (hours) (hours)
Whole team 680 214 850
AFTER Travel Admin Visiting
(hours) (hours) (hours)
Whole team 218 142 562
If the report contains a pie chart for each, it will be easy to see that in the pie chart covering the period using the software to schedule appointments, the team is spending less time travelling and more time with clients.
I’ve already put the data into an EXCEL file for you.
