Enhancing data reporting with the UK Health Security Agency

Challenge 

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is a government agency responsible for protecting every member of the community from the impact of infectious diseases and other health threats. The UKHSA currently report daily on the status of these incidents using a manual product containing a written narrative. The main aim for TPXimpact was to enhance the current product and introduce a digital dashboard to give decision makers critical data and analytics to support the fight to protect the UK population.  

These new dashboards gave UKHSA end users the ability to interact with the data, instead of only seeing a written summary. The aim was to reduce the amount of data queries the team receive who currently build the manual product.

Solution 

To achieve this, the development team at TPXimpact developed a digital prototype. This included architectural changes, including creating a database to ingest the data. The data from this database was then ingested into Power BI, which we used as our front-end solution. We then used Power BI to create a report for a selection of incidents that are currently reported on in the manual product.

We split each report into three components. Keeping the format of the original product, we firstly ingested a narrative layer. We then went on to enhance the original functionality by including an analytical layer. This layer contained KPIs and graphs, to display the most important metrics for that incident. Each report incident was tailored to the individual team. This was achieved by conducting user experience interviews, to understand what data and visual display would suit their needs best. The final component to the report was a data layer, containing a line list of each of the data points. This was considered beneficial, as the user was able to see the data, which is used to build the visuals, allowing a ‘self-service’ functionality.

Impact 

The main aim for this piece of work was to move away from the current manual product (which was time consuming and required manual effort) into a digital solution, which aimed to be automated where possible. The digital solution was also designed so that the end users could ‘self- service’ their own data queries and understand more information from the incident than a written summary could provide. We were able to achieve this goal through the prototype that we developed.

As part of our development, we also ensured that a detailed handover document was created. This explained the architecture/design of the prototype, so that the UKHSA team could take this forward and build upon the prototype themselves to include future incidents. This was one of the main aims of the project. We therefore ensured we included clear documentation, so that the UKHSA team could continue this work without the support of the TPXimpact developers in the future.