Hi,
This is a general question about BO. I’ve read a lot of documentation about it being used in industry, but yesterday in the paper I noted that one local branch of the NHS (National Health Service) is using it, which intrigued me because I was wondering what exactly they would be using it for (charting patient numbers? waiting lists? ). I was wondering if anyone was using BO in that sort of environment and what purpose it served?
And no, I’m not looking for job interview tips I’m just interested in general.
Cheers,
BatCat
I used to work in the NHS a few years ago, and the trust used it for things like monitoring clinic usage, ward occupancy, A&E demand, producing lists of inpatient and their religions for the chaplains, generating the reporting laid down by the government and health authorities, data quality exception reporting, management accounting…
It’s not that much different to what private-sector companies use it for really.
Edit: Oh! One other cool thing I saw was a trust who used BO to generate letters to patients, which then fed into kit to stuff them into envelopes, frank them, etc.
Intriguing.
I’m really kind of new to Business Objects (4 months and counting) we use it for an American insurance company and are only just starting to produce reports. I’d been aware that it was used by universities and also local government in the UK, but I was just wondering what actual practical usage it had.
That’s interesting that they used it to write letters to people. I wonder how they did that.
Thanks very much for allaying my curiousity.
Cheers,
BatCat
With a bit of fiddling around with variables, you can create the text of a letter and feed in things like name, address, clinic date, etc. from a data provider.
From what I saw at a couple of uni’s, they were aiming at using BO for reporting on everything from applications through to student records and grades, course/module details… And all the usual management accounting, HR, etc.
I haven’t seen that much of local government, but the bit I did see were developing BO to report against planning applications, so they could monitor their progress.
I think it may be used a little more effectively once the new NHS Spine system is up and running. Essentially this project will create one of the worlds largets transaction databases, now there’s just gotta be a way to use BO then!
Hi there, I work in a Social Services department and use BO everyday in my job to report on the departments activity both internally and to provide the performance indicators and returns to central goverment. Reports include number of referrals (and clients location), numbers of supported residents, hours and units of homecre delivered, registrations to the child protection regeister, etc. etc. I also use BO to montor the quality of data input to our system.
This is all really interesting!
I had no idea BO was used so widely in the public services here.
I’ve also been reading up on the Spine System, that should be a handy innovation too.
Thanks,
BatCat
When you think about how much data the different parts of the public sector hold, it makes sense that they’d need something like BO to help turn it into something useable.
The plans for IT in the NHS do sound very interesting, and it will be good to see them pull it off after trying to work towards combining medical records into electronic form for so long.
We (at University of Pennsylvania) have used Business Objects since the mid-90s (version 3!). We have an extensive Data Warehouse, and use Business Objects for reporting/analysis there and even from some production systems. There are lots of other universities out there too.
I was doing some work for the NHS in Scotland last year, developing Business Objects reports and some VB apps to support them.
Basically the reports were being used to monitor GP performance at a practice level, relative to targets for treatment levels for various disease categories.
Since the reports indicated the payment bonus levels that each GP qualfied for, funnily enough I had a lot of user involvement and feedback!!
Just wanted to check if NHS is still using Business Objects particularly in Scotland…!! If yes, where does the IT department that works on all this operate from - I mean which city?
I did wonder…until I saw that you are counting down the days to mat leave…good luck 8) . One of my ex-colleagues had previously worked on one of the multiple NHS projects, this was more the development rather than the usage that you are talking about. It sounded like a typical government project…that isn’t a good thing
I work in a hospital and Business Objects is used here. It is used to follow up movement of patients throughout the hospital, invoicing, procurement, reporting to the government,…
I’m just interested in general.
(BOB member since 2004-05-18)
(BOB member since 2002-06-07)
(BOB member since 2003-01-15)
(BOB member since 2006-09-28)