While reporting is essential for monitoring healthcare projects, the manual creation of reports often results in wasted time and unforeseen difficulties. Fortunately, there is a solution for increasing efficiency and exploiting the most relevant data: setting up automated weekly reports.
What is a weekly report?
A weekly report provides an overview of an organisation’s performance over a given week. Using interactive visualisations, it enables managers and staff to track progress over the last 7 days and identify areas for improvement.
This frequency of reporting ensures efficiency and responsiveness, as the information is regularly updated. Nevertheless, the time between each report is long enough to take a step back and observe trends, which is not the case with a daily report.
As a general rule, the weekly report is used to monitor the progress of a project, which can involve any function in a company: finance, marketing, sales, human resources, etc. More specifically, in the healthcare sector, this tool can be used for a variety of purposes, such as tracking patients or medical records.
Key features of a weekly report automation tool
Automation is a process whereby weekly health reports are generated and updated automatically using software. The software generally uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to retrieve a wide range of data instantaneously.
As a result, project managers and other health data analysts have weekly access to up-to-date reports, which they can then share with the relevant stakeholders.
As well as extracting data, automated reporting software provides a 360-degree view of an organisation’s progress. It is therefore an invaluable aid for making informed decisions on a day-to-day basis, based on reliable information analysed in real time.
Finally, this tool enables reports to be customised to meet the needs of all user profiles, adapting to the specific features of each sector. This makes it a valuable tool for project management, particularly in the healthcare sector.
What are the benefits of automated weekly reporting in the healthcare sector?
Particularly time-consuming, manual reporting is not well suited to monitoring the progress of healthcare projects. Automated weekly reporting is therefore a highly advantageous alternative.
Improve your decision-making
While monthly, quarterly or annual reports can be useful, they don’t provide the short-term information that a weekly progress report does. However, regular monitoring of relevant key performance indicators enables you to make better, more informed decisions.
Identify areas for improvement
With data updated virtually in real time, the automated weekly reports provide a detailed overview of the progress of the organisation’s various projects.
This enables us to identify areas for improvement, but also to detect sources of inefficiency before they become too serious. Creating weekly reports is a real time and money saver: when a malfunction is spotted, it can be corrected immediately.
Monitor the performance of your teams
Weekly reporting is also very useful for monitoring the progress of teams, as managers get an overview of their employees, the tasks they carry out and their results.
This makes it much easier to assess employees’ ability to achieve their objectives, and then to give them personalised feedback. All of which means you can get them more involved in their day-to-day work.
Collaborate more effectively
An automated weekly reporting tool is also a powerful lever for improving communication and collaboration between the various stakeholders.
Modern Business Intelligence and data visualisation solutions make it easier to understand raw data by transforming it into relevant information. Using graphs, curves, tables and maps, BI makes data fun and accessible to as many people as possible. It even goes so far as to tell stories with data, through data storytelling.
What’s more, thanks to a self-service approach, this type of tool enables every user to create their own reports, whether they are a data novice or an expert. It is therefore a fundamental step towards adopting a data-driven culture at all levels of the organisation.
What are the best practices for writing a weekly health report?
Automated weekly reports have a lot going for them, but they still need to be used wisely to monitor the progress of a project and measure the organisation’s performance in real time.
Determine your objectives
To create a relevant weekly report template, it is essential to review the organisation’s main objectives.
Although this step may seem obvious, many companies are tempted to embark on reporting ‘blindly’, without really knowing what they are trying to find out by analysing their data.
The objectives of an automated weekly report can take different forms, for example :
- Inform the target audience about the progress of an ongoing project.
- Check that the project does not exceed its allocated budget.
- Sharing the achievements of the past week, but also the problems encountered and the challenges ahead.
- Provide updates on the project schedule, resources allocated, deliverables provided, etc.
In all cases, the needs and issues of each department must be examined with a fine-tooth comb, in order to identify relevant objectives that will enable the activity to be managed effectively.
Select your data sources
Another key step in producing a weekly report on the progress of a project is to choose the data sources that provide the most relevant information. In other words, the sources selected must be suited to the reporting objectives previously established.
Extracting reliable, accurate data that meets the organisation’s needs is an essential prerequisite for transforming data into usable information, using data visualisation.
Healthcare project managers, for whom responsiveness and precision are crucial, have access to regularly updated, high-quality insights, enabling them to act quickly and with full knowledge of the facts.
Define your key performance indicators
Once the objectives and data sources have been established, it’s time to choose the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your weekly reporting model.
Be careful, however, not to get lost in the shuffle: the KPIs selected must be focused on the objectives, so as not to divert readers’ attention towards superfluous elements. Similarly, it is preferable to use a limited number of indicators, otherwise you run the risk of drowning essential subjects in a flood of indigestible information.
Finally, the way in which the indicators are presented is at least as important as the KPIs themselves. The information must be perfectly legible and understandable at a glance… Which brings us to the importance of the design of an automated weekly report.
Present your weekly report with care
Once a handful of relevant key performance indicators have been defined, the real work lies in the presentation of the report.
A high-quality design, with colourful visuals and a neat layout, is a real plus, but that’s not the whole story… In fact, in an automated weekly report, content is even more important than form.
A pitfall to be avoided absolutely is that of visual overload, which risks detracting from the clarity of the document by obscuring the most important information. The ease of use of the report can also suffer from an overloaded design. So it’s best to keep things simple and stick to two or three different colours.
However, visuals are invaluable for communicating information succinctly. They are also more pleasant and easier to digest than blocks of text, provided they are used intelligently. With a data visualisation tool, you can easily generate representations of all kinds, such as graphs or tables, to structure the weekly report and draw attention to the most important data.
Indeed, even with high-quality visuals, decision-makers may need a little extra help to understand the report’s key findings – and, more importantly, to identify the actions they need to take next.
Highlighting key information allows readers to concentrate on the essentials. The design of the report should therefore highlight the major trends and issues encountered, but also show how the results align with the organisation’s objectives. Finally, the document must provide actionable recommendations for decision-makers, backed up by data analysis.
Add context to your report
To make a weekly report easier to understand, it is very important to contextualise the information it contains. One way of doing this is to compare the week’s KPIs with historical data.
By giving indicators more context, it’s easier to measure the progress of a project, identify a rise or fall in performance, or detect seasonal fluctuations.
More broadly, including historical data in a weekly report provides a glimpse of underlying trends and long-term patterns, helping the organisation to make informed decisions based on past performance.
Be careful, however, not to overuse this historical information. A weekly report should remain succinct, quick to read and understand, so as to inform the reader in real time (or almost). Comparisons between past and present results should be used sparingly, to highlight the most notable changes.
Share the weekly report
A weekly report is intended to be shared with all those directly or indirectly involved in the current project.
Beforehand, you need to identify which employees are likely to be interested in the data presented. If necessary, it may also be a good idea to tailor the report to the target audience: decision-makers, business users, project managers, etc. The conclusions and recommendations must be directly usable by the reader.
All that remains is to send the document to the various stakeholders. This is where a tool for automating weekly reports comes in very handy, as it allows the results to be shared with the people concerned automatically, week after week.
Project management is a major challenge for hospitals and other healthcare establishments, which have to juggle a multitude of data to keep track of patients, medical records and overall performance. Hence the growing importance of automated weekly reports in the healthcare sector, enabling precise data extraction and clear visualisation of the progress of different projects.