Delivering High Volume Reporting
Case Study
Problem
The Care Quality Commission ▶ (CQC) of the UK National Health Service (NHS) must produce thousands of quality reports each month (yes the reports are read and acted upon). The job of the CQC is to inspect, report and monitor improvement of the quality of all types of healthcare being provided to all citizens in the UK.
CQC inspectors used to create these reports as word documents and then send them off to an independent house to be typeset in InDesign. This was very expensive and very slow, just like traditional publishing when it uses these 90's tools. This method was failing fast.
Next on the advice of those who know, they spent a large amount of money on a custom CMS system. That was a failure for all the reasons a CMS is not the environment for producing multiple formats from formally authored documents using dozens of templates.
The CQC needed a better answer that:
- Addressed the increasing volume and velocity of reporting requirements and allowed for unlimited future growth.
- Increased the quality and range of reports across every type of healthcare service.
- Substantially reduced the cost of operations while making it easier for inspectors to create reports and get on with the next inspection.
- Used the Internet to allow their geographically spread inspectors to more easily author, edit and peer-review
Solution
AxisTwelve ▶ is our development lead partner in the UK. They create amazing online resources for large organizations. They proposed using IGP:Digital Publisher in a customized interface for the report writing. Demonstrations and prototypes were done, custom templates created and much more. We got to work.
IGP:Digital Publisher is a mature and sophisticated publisher production solution that demonstrated it's suitability for the job. IGP:Digital Publisher addresses the production and long-term content management requirements of a wide range of publisher content (trade, academic, education, reference, etc.) and directly addressed all of the CQC challenges:
- It is an Online Solution designed for the creation and maintenance of multiple books or documents simultaneously.
- It is easy and cost-effective to create multiple document reports that have easy to use, familiar, word-processor-like interfaces.
- Authorized authors, editors and reviewers can access documents and make fully tracked changes.
- Format production includes PDF, eBooks and Online access including automatic transfer to the public distribution system (created by AxisTwelve) on publishing release.
The AxisTwelve team were the "Johnny's on the spot" that distilled the very large CQC requirements into the custom specification and handled the integration into the CQC system. Meanwhile the Infogrid Pacific team did the IGP:Digital Publisher report authoring system custom, custom templates development and testing. This included significant metadata management so reports could be accessed online.
Implementation
The full system took less than six months to customize and deploy. The client requested changes during development, deployment and testing. These were easily and quickly addressed by the IGP development team because the various change requirements were presentation, input and output customizations. The rock-solid core system needed no development or modification.
The system went live in late 2014 producing reports and transferring the PDFs and search metadata to the delivery website. New templates and further customization is ongoing.
After going live inspectors requested changes to editing features and other enhancements. These were updated on the live system without any disruptions.
In only 24 months 120,000+ reports have been created by around 1,000 inspection teams. (Search and view the reports here ▶). These cover Hospitals, Doctors, Dentists, Clinics, Care homes, Nursing homes, Mental health services and a lot more.
Part view of a report template covering various hosptial services. The output is both an online searchable report and downloadable PDF.
During that time additional report templates have been created and been made instantly available for work. The system continues to deliver hundreds of very large and detailed reports every month.
The secret to the speed of deployment and matching exact production requirements starts with the HTML5 tagging patterns and quality. The IGP team's depth of experience; and working with the right tools for the job; enabled this massive project to just happen.
For formal documentation that must be trusted over time the IGP:Digital Publisher production approach leaves Content Management Systems in its dust!
Results
The CQC project was understood and quickly deployed by the AxisTwelve and Estel Labs teams because of the depth of knowledge and experience in digital production with multi-format delivery.
At Estel Labs we spend most of our time working with publisher content. Our technology solutions are designed for the production, distribution and delivery of book content of all types in multiple formats... instantly. All types means trade fiction and non-fiction, academic, textbooks and various periodicals such as magazines and journals.
The National Health Service CQC reporting system continues on today delivering exceptional value and ease of use for Inspectors and their teams, while saving hundreds of thousands of pounds in report production costs.