EmailShrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is testing software from Neutrino Concepts, a Birmingham based start-up which aims to bring together data held in various systems.
Nigel Appleton, the trust's chief information officer, said producing reports on the trust's performance against the government's 18 week target for referral to start of treatment has occupied a substantial chunk of the time of one of his staff.
The Neutrino system has automated the production of reports on indicators, however, including how many patients have breached the 18 weeks, broken down by speciality and referring primary care organisation.
Appleton said he faced increasing demands for reports analysing trust data. "There is shortage of SQL IT people to crunch and process data," he said. "What I'm looking for is safe, user self-service."
"The thing we're aiming at in big hospitals is flow," he added. "Once we get flow going, everyone knows how long they will wait in the system, which comes out of good information."
"I might not rush out and buy it today, but it looks like something very useful," Appleton added. His trust is not paying Neutrino for the pilot work which started in mid-January, and which took 20 days of development work to produce the automatically updated reports.
Neutrino is not aiming to sell only to health, but does see particular potential in the NHS, planning a specific product for trusts based on the Shrewsbury pilot.
Chief technology Patrick Foody said the software can deal with incomplete and inaccurate information. "We can mask it as 'unknown' without changing the underlying data, so you can still account for it," he said, adding that ignoring data because one field was missing can skew resulting reports.
Lord Digby Jones, the firm's chair, said there was potential elsewhere in the public sector, including local authorities and emergency services. "We're talking to a police authority at the moment about this," he said.
The former government minister added that the software could help public sector organisations improve their processes. "It will put a floodlight on certain practices which aren't naughty, but are inefficient," he said.
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