Power BI Case Study - Healthcare Analytics Dashboard

Data has become an essential part of delivering better care. With increasing pressure on NHS resources, healthcare professionals and support staff are expected to do more with less, all while maintaining high-quality outcomes, patient safety, regulatory compliance, patient satisfaction and cost-effectiveness through effective analytics. Whether it’s a discharge delay due to paperwork or a ward running over 90% occupancy, small inefficiencies can quickly lead to larger bottlenecks across the system.

That’s why building better reports and dashboards in healthcare isn't about creating fancy dashboards, it's about helping operational and clinical teams make faster decisions, reduce delays and improve overall patient care.

Working previously with private healthcare providers and with NHS trusts, I know how difficult it can be to turn healthcare data and datasets into something useful.

Build the Story, Then the Dashboard – Healthcare Edition

This blog post offers a concise summary of the key points from the Power BI dashboard video below. Feel free to watch it as excellent feedback has been received so far by various people within healthcare organisation. But to reiterate, this blog provides a shorter, more summary version of how to automate reporting for better insights.

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What Do We Mean by ‘Build the Story, Then the Dashboard’?

Too many reporting projects start with the tool, with the tech. Whether its Power BI, Tableau, Qlik or any other data visualisation tool, the tool becomes the focus, not the purpose of the end users.

Yes, use Power BI to design, visualise and analyse a hospital management dashboard, but first identify the users and understand their needs.

With that said, we focus on deeply understanding the day-to-day pressures, business objectives and challenges end-users face. For the healthcare solution here, this meant spending time with bed managers and ward supervisors to ask questions like:

• What are you trying to achieve with your data analysis efforts?
• Where are the pain points?
• What does a good day look like?
• What’s slowing you down?
• What actions would you take to automate processes and improve outcomes?

We then used this input to build a wireframe which offers a preview of the Power BI report. Not a finished report, but a prototype that could be reviewed and iterated on, a draft story we could agree on before diving into development. Only once we were confident that story was right, did we start building the final Power BI solution.

If we spend more time here, the rest of the process is easier and the overall likelihood of success increases.

How to Gather the Story for This Power BI Case Study?

The diagram below provides a high-level overview of the elements I consider when gathering an effective data story. It highlights the process of transforming end-user requirements into solutions that deliver genuine insights. While this showcases the foundational steps, there is far more depth to the method than meets the eye.

The information below was derived by various workshops with both the bed managers and ward supervisors of a hospital. They are responsible for managing patient flow, daily discharges/admissions and ward capacity, hence needed near real-time visibility.

The Bed Management & Discharge Dashboard

The below Microsoft Power BI solution was the outcome of the above. Again, it was built for bed managers and ward supervisors who manage patient flow, daily discharges/admissions and ward capacity. All our dashboards and reports are built using such approach.

Challenges This Solution Solves:

• Bed occupancy climbing over 90% with no early warning
• No visibility on which patients are ready to go or what’s blocking them
• Lack of discharge accountability across staff or bays
• More admissions than discharges over time
• Reactive, not proactive, capacity planning

Key Questions Answered By the Dashboard:

• How full are our wards right now?
• Which patients are ready to be discharged?
• What’s blocking those discharges and where?
• Are we keeping up with admissions?
• Are certain bays or wards consistently over or under pressure?
• Can we balance patient flow better across the hospital?

Discover Your Story, Build Meaningful Solutions

In summary, converting raw data into actionable insights and analysing healthcare data goes beyond crafting attractive dashboards. It’s about developing solutions that address genuine business challenges and foster impactful decision-making. By embracing “Build The Story, Then The Dashboard,” we uncover the true data analytics needs of your end-users and deliver tailored solutions that drive measurable results.

The Bed Management and Discharge Dashboard is just one example of how this approach can transform how healthcare providers approach their reporting. From pinpointing clinics with suboptimal outcomes, empowering care teams with data-driven interventions, further improve patient care or to reduce waiting times, meaningful healthcare solutions begin by understanding the story behind the metrics.

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