Discovery

What is Discovery?

Discovery is an ongoing collaboration between NHS boards, the Scottish Government, and Public Health Scotland.

It is an online management information system that provides approved users with access to a range of comparative healthcare information. It supports performance and quality improvement across health and social care in Scotland.

Examples of staff who can request access are employees from the following organisations:

• Scottish Government
• territorial and special health boards
• local authorities
• health and social care partnerships

Discovery is not open to members of the public, the press, academia, or researchers.

Who is Discovery intended for?

Discovery has been developed for use by a wide range of users including, but not limited to:

• managers and directors
• analysts
• clinicians
• finance staff
• improvement staff

It provides users with comparative and benchmarking information to underpin service planning and delivery.

What data is available on Discovery?

The majority of data in Discovery is based on regular health board submissions to Public Health Scotland.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• A&E activity
• hospital admissions
• outpatient activity
• waiting times
• mental health activity
• prescribing data
• healthcare-associated infection surveillance (ECOSS)
• child health systems programmes
• Scottish Immunisation and Recall Systems (SIRS)
• maternity activity

We also have English and Welsh peer activity for benchmarking purposes sourced from NHS England and NHS Wales.

Most dashboards in Discovery are updated monthly, based on data held in the national data warehouses, but this will depend on the topic.

What comparisons can a user make on Discovery?

Discovery dashboards have been built to allow easy benchmarking across a range of indicators and topics between:

• health boards
• hospitals
• specialties
• local authorities
• health and social care partnerships
• localities

Dashboards within Discovery can be viewed from a health board of treatment or health board of residence perspective.

Treatment views will allow health board and hospital comparisons across relevant peer groups.

Residence views will allow local authority and/or health and social care partnerships to compare performance and activity across relevant peer groups.

There is functionality within many Discovery dashboards for bespoke peer groups to be built by the user.

How secure is the information in Discovery?

Discovery is hosted in an NHS National Services Scotland (NHS NSS) secure data centre in accordance with NHS NSS and Public Health Scotland security policies.

Access is available at three levels.

Access levels

This is a summary of the levels of access.

More in depth information about access levels is available on request from phs.discovery@phs.scot​

Wraparound service

Discovery provides a customer-focused support service to ensure users get the most out of Discovery. 

Services provided by the wraparound service include:

• developing and delivering focused Discovery training and user guides
• supporting health board users to improve their understanding and use of the Discovery product
• providing bespoke analytical service in response to user queries to complement Discovery information
• creating customised feedback reports
• working with health boards to inform future Discovery developments

Registered Discovery users can access a wide range of Discovery case studies from our online library.

Training

We can provide bespoke training sessions for groups of Discovery users.

Sessions would be designed in conjunction with the users to ensure that the participants get the most out of the session.

Registered users can access our online library of comprehensive Discovery training manuals.

Online videos

Registered Discovery users can access our online library of comprehensive training videos, with associated slide packs, guides, and case studies with direct links into Discovery.

Here are some of our most popular training videos.

Discovery champions

If you would like to know more about how Discovery is being used in your own or another organisation, you can contact the relevant Discovery champion listed below.

Information champions

A Discovery information champion is typically located within the organisations information team and will be able to share how they are using Discovery to complement their local reporting.

Clinical champions

A Discovery clinical information champion is typically a clinician with an interest in data and information. They are able to share how they have used or are using Discovery to support clinical service review.