Empowering Healthcare Leaders: How Totara and POWER BI integration create dynamic and intuitive reporting dashboards

University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (UHDB) is one of the largest hospital providers in the country, caring for over one million patients each year, and employing 14,000 NHS staff. The Trust is comprised of two acute hospitals and three community hospitals, providing exceptional care to the populations of Derbyshire and Staffordshire.

The Challenge

The Totara software had not been implemented at UHDB long when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Totara Learning Management System (LMS) had allowed us to maintain a learning and education function throughout the pandemic, despite social distancing restrictions. Although Totara’s software offered a modern and accessible system for managing learning, compliance inevitably took a hit. UHDB entered a “post-COVID” recovery period, not only with patient-facing services but within our learning and education function too. It became clear that an immediate compliance improvement project was needed to restore training requirements that had been relaxed during the pandemic.

The Solution

During the initial stages of the compliance improvement project, it became evident that line managers and leaders within the organisation were lacking an intuitive and simple method for reviewing training compliance in one place. While Totara has a fantastic suite of reporting functions, feedback from leaders on the ground indicated that the need for something more visual and even easier to use – something that could be accessed at the touch of a button and used to quickly brief teams, especially during concise team meetings.

The initial solution was to export raw data from Totara and manually populate a spreadsheet, allowing leaders to view overall compliance with several graphs and charts. However, after several months, the burden of the manual data manipulation became unmanageable necessitating a better solution.

At that stage, UHDB decided to reach out to our in-house Business Intelligence Department and the newly formed “HR Analytics” team (HRA). Using the excel workbook as a guide and integrating Totara with POWER BI, HRA designed and implemented a suite of training dashboards that enabled the organisation to display compliance information for our Mandatory and Role Essential training.

Deploying Totara as the primary LMS and utilising integration has allowed a seamless data flow from the LMS to POWER BI. Additional integration with other HR systems has allowed HRA to exclude ‘non-available staff’ from the compliance data before it is displayed on the dashboard.

Another integration utilised at UHDB is the bi-directional link between ESR and Totara, developed directly with NHS England. This integration has facilitated the of transfer thousands of training records in and out of the LMS for NHS staff moving between organisations.

This integration not only significantly reduces the potential duplication of training for new starters but also saves a substantial amount of time and money. Since the integration between ESR and Totara went live in 2022, UHDB has estimated savings of over 10,000 training hours, equivalent to the average pay of over £100,000.

The Result

The Training dashboards now allow line managers and senior leaders within the organisation to view compliance in various forms depending on hierarchy filters selected.

These dashboards enable easy identification of compliance outliers by staff group and department. Once outliers are identified, users can drill trough the figures to produce employee lists. Furthermore, there is a dashboard dedicated to expiry forecasting, allowing manager to enable forward planning months and years in advance.

Having real-time data has already had huge impact on the confidence in the quality of the data displayed on the dashboards. Previously, leaders would have to wait a whole month, which by the data could be six weeks out of date. time it was published was already potentially 6 weeks out of date. Now, leaders only wait seven days, with the anticipation of even shorter waiting times in the near future.

Soon, users will only have to wait 24 hours.

With confidence in compliance data at an all-time high, the use of the dashboards and analysis of the data has increased, meaning managers are much more likely to use the data to encourage staff to update their training compliance. In the past 12 months, the trust has increased mandatory training compliance by 4% to 90.30%, the highest compliance achieved since April 2019, largely due to the Totara platform.

Next, UHDB will be working with the BI Team, HRA, and Operations to design and launch a scenario-based forecasting tool that will use staffing, environmental, and national data to predict future rises and falls in compliance, leading to improvements in planning.

The functionality of Totara software has yielded substantial cost savings for UHDB:

• Staffing Cost Reduction: £40,000 per year in staffing costs, attributed to the increased processing speed enabling the organisation to manage workload with current staff rather than hiring replacements.
• HR Data Automation: UHDB expects an additional annual saving of £21,000 in staffing costs once HR data automation is implemented. This automation will eliminate the need for manual processes, further streamlining operations and reducing reliance on additional staffing.
• Total Savings to Date: Since the implementation of Totara, UHDB has realized an estimated saving of £230,000. This includes savings from both staffing efficiency and integration with the CSTF ESR interface.

UHDB anticipates continued cost savings and operational efficiencies with the ongoing utilisation and optimisation of Totara software. These savings underscore the significant impact that effective technology solutions can have on organisational productivity and resource management.

“The link between Totara and POWER BI has produced a powerful tool that has been rolled out across the organisation. Together, Totara and POWER BI have created a valuable resource for our leaders which I’m sure has already made an impactful difference to the quality of care and the safety of our colleagues and our patients.”

Amanda Rawlings, Director of People Services