11 November 2024
Triptych metrics
If I were a clinical director in an acute hospital, I would postively insist on seeing activity data like this updated every week. Three charts, side by side. The starter-for-ten platform for assessing how well—or how badly—patients are flowing through the directorate.
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8 November 2024
Kaplan-Meier curves
I like the idea of taking a data visualization from one discipline and applying it to another. Kaplan-Meier curves are often used for visualizing survival following the diagnosis of a serious illness, but I think they can also work for visualizing length of stay.
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25 October 2024
Overlapping histograms
I'm getting increasingly drawn to the idea of using overlapping histograms as a way of showing how something is - or is not - differnet from another thing. On eof the classic uses of overlapping histograms (in the stats textbooks, at least!) is a distribution of adult female heights on the left and a distribution of adult male heights on the right.
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11 October 2024
ED feedback loops
Is it the crowding that causes the length of stay? Or is it the length of stay that causes the crowding? When I ask clinicians this question, they usually say it's the crowding that causes long lengths of stay. But when I ask data analysts, they often say it's the long lengths of stay that cause the crowding.
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4 October 2024
In-frame length of stay
I'm trying to come up with a name for length of stay when I only want to describe the length of stay that occurs between two fixed points (in this case, 9th Sep and 16th Sep).
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27 September 2024
Process capability
Have a look at this chart and—for the moment—disregard the colour-coding and the arrows. It shows 366 days in the life of an inpatient specialty (it's General Medicine), and it's a specialty that has 55 beds officially allocated to it.
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20 September 2024
The Chernobyl courtroom scene
I've been re-watching the Sky drama series Chernobyl, and last night I got to the courtroom scene. The bit where Valery Legasov explains how the explosion happened, using red and blue acrylic tablets placed on a window-frame-type-thing was just virtuosic! Way better than PowerPoint!
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13 September 2024
The Eisenhower Matrix
Maybe it's a data analyst thing, but I can't help but think that the Eisenhower Matrix is the wrong way round. If I'm trying to use this for time management, and I score (on a scale from 1 to 10) each of the things on my to-do list with an 'urgency score' and an 'importance score', then something that's really urgent and really important will get 10 and 10. So that item should go in the top right of the matrix...
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6 September 2024
Translate everything
TRANSLATE EVERYTHING. That's the title of the very first chapter of Chip Heath and Karla Starr's book Making Numbers Count. When we write or talk about numbers we should use phrases like "What that means is..." or "To put that into context...", otherwise we're not doing it properly.
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4 September 2024
Funnel plots in Excel
I want to present the data in a 'non-confrontational' way. I want to say to the consultants: "Here is the extent of the variation. And here are the consultants whose mean length of stay is statistically significantly higher or lower than the overall average." But I don't want to do it in a 'finger-pointing blame-game' way.
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2 September 2024
We've done data.
In my opinion, you're not 'doing' data about patient flow unless you are plonking the data right under the noses of the people whose behaviour needs to change in order for the improvement to happen. In fact, not just 'plonking it under their noses', but talking them through the numbers, engaging in a dialogue with them, making appointments to speak to them again after you've re-analysed the numbers according to their observations and comments.
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26 August 2024
The RCEM's Roadmap to Recovery
Acute hospitals need to make available to each specialty its indicators. Its actual numbers, its 'ought-to-be' numbers. The specialties need to have routine meetings at which these numbers are presented and discussed.
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23 August 2024
Meetings, bloody meetings
Suddenly, just before six o' clock yesterday teatime, I had a 'light bulb' moment: I've been looking at it the wrong way all this time. Flow_ology isn't a series of graphs; it's a series of meetings.
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13 August 2024
Using Data to Make Business Decisions
This is a course I've been delivering for a few years now. It was originally commissioned by the London Skills Development Network. Anyway, I've recently re-designed it to make it much more practical and example-based. It's now a hands-on course with quite a bit of Excel and PowerPoint whereas before it was much more theoretical.
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9 August 2024
Arguing with Numbers
I've re-written the Arguing with Numbers webpage to better reflect how the course now looks. It's developed quite a lot in the last couple of years as I've experimented with new ways of presenting data and encountered new books and videos on how to do it.
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6 August 2024
"It's data, Jim. But not as we know it."
For a number of years during the Pre-Pandemic Era, I used to travel up and down the country facilitating a workshop called Flowopoly. Flowopoly was a very physical, very tactile, 'anti-digital' way of representing a hospital's patient flow using tables, boards and cards.
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3 August 2024
Flowopoly gets a makeover
Flowopoly has had a makeover. It still begins with a whole-hospital replay, but it now comes equipped with 'flow moments', 'zoomed-in' downstream specialty replays (which allow us to see a fortnight's patient moves in 45 minutes), and simulated what-if scenarios, so that we can see the impact of changes we make to the system.
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2 August 2024
Dances, masks and feathers
A couple of days ago I was introduced to a meeting as a 'field analyst'. Which—rightly or wrongly—I took as a compliment. And which prompted me to re-visit and edit a piece about data analyst 'fieldwork' I wrote seven years ago.
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31 July 2024
Data League Tables
I had a conversation yesterday with a consultant geriatrician. One of the things we talked about was the pros and cons of presenting length of stay data in league table format.
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18 July 2024
The green zone
We can usually measure how long patients spend waiting in A&E for a bed to become available. The idea here is that we're just measuring the amount of delay. It's how long the patient is spending in A&E once the A&E bit of their treatment has been completed. This information can be useful if we want to get a clearer picture of the extent to which exit block is a problem for patient flow.
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