Torbay Hospital In-patient wards and treatment centres for mental health patients on the west side of the complex. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The previous couple of posts in this category haven’t exactly been exciting but they are important for context. Now things can concentrate more on the solution we are going to create.

There are two main classes of business intelligence required – clinical and operational. The most important user stories are listed in italic text below.

Clinical Requirements

Clinicians want to know how effective treatments are; patient outcomes; diagnosis statistics and critical incident analysis:

As a doctor I want to see treatment counts by patient and outcome so that I can determine the most effective treatments.

As a doctor I want to see critical incident counts by patient and mental health professional.

Operational Requirements

Operational business intelligence is primarily concerned with service costs, efficiency and capacity planning:

As an operational manager I want to see counts of assessments, treatments and discharges so I can plan capacity and monitor the number of patients in the system.

As an operational manager I want monitor prescribing costs to budget effectively and look for unusual prescribing patterns.

As an operational manager I want to see the number of bed days available and used so that I can monitor capacity and make sure suitable out of area options are available if needed.

As an operational manager I want to see complaints by patient and mental health professional so I can make sure the service has a good customer focus.

Other Requirements

Finally, there are also IT requirements which must be satisfied but since they are not value-add for patients and doctors I’ll look into them later.

This list is not exhaustive but the plan is to be agile – list the most important requirements, stack rank them and work down the list in iterations and re-plan often. Requirements will change, new ones will become apparent and some may even disappear before implementation starts. We will embrace this and not worry about the future too much.