We work with you to understand your data
We are an organisation of data specialists with years of experience with NHS and other data and datasets.
Vijay Dabhi
Co-Founder
Vijay brings over 17 years of multifaceted experience in technical, managerial, and architectural roles across diverse public sector organisations, including the NHS, universities, local authorities, and the Department for Education.
During his recent time at the University of Hull, he excels in crafting high-level architecture for digital spine, CRM, and ERP systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security. His expertise spans system review, legacy decommissioning, and seamless data migration.
In previous roles, particularly at the Department for Education, he successfully delivered projects related to data governance, data quality, and data centralisation, implementing robust data security models. Notably, Vijay’s contributions at Sandwell Council involved migrating legacy systems to new platforms, consolidating databases, and aligning reports with stakeholder requirements.
With over a decade's experience in the NHS, he led the Data Management team at UHB NHS Trust, pioneering real-time data initiatives and earning recognition, including the Chief Executive's Innovation in Practice Award for his impactful clinical dashboard design that enhanced patient care and clinical performance.
Joe Cook
Co-Founder
Solutions and Data Architect with +20 years of experience in database and system design for clients covering eCommerce, Circular Economy, Logistics and Healthcare. Joe has worked in and around the NHS for 20 years and has extensive experience of national reporting requirements, NHS contracting (PbR) and the CDS data dictionary. He has experience covering virtually all non-clinical and clinical datasets.
Joe has delivered system and personnel reviews in both the public and private sector, helping to future proof organisations and organisations to get the best out of their data.
In previous roles, particularly at University Hospitals Birmingham, he has lead on many trust wide initiatives in delivering large system migrations and also been responsible for the design and setup of the Trust's data and reporting infrastructure whilst delivering data quality improvements.
He has also been active as a DBA throughout a lot of his career and has proven on countless occasions his ability to optimise processes and automate a variety of manual tasks.
Let's have a chat and learn more about what we can do for you.
Sandwell Council
Project Overview
The project requirement was to migrate the council data and databases from legacy housing infrastructure to new corporate infrastructure. This would include migrating all applications and databases from legacy servers to new servers on the new infrastructure
Database Consolidation
The first step was to consolidate a number of databases to ensure it was easier to manage in future for the current in-house team. There were 76 databases in total, and all databases were monitored to ensure active databases are consolidated and unused databases were archived and decommissioned.
Data Processing Improvements
The extraction processes every night were taking a very long time (at least 12 hours every night) and when there were any technical issues it was proving difficult to re-run the current processes and to catchup during the working day. These processes were reviewed to understand the root cause and subsequently the processes were changed to ensure it finished in 3 hours instead of 12 hours. This improvement also enabled the process to be easily restarted during a day to refresh data in cubes, reports and dashboard across council in the event of any unforeseen circumstances.
Database Migration
All databases were migrated from legacy servers of SQL server 2005 to SQL Server 2012. Any unused databases, cube reports and SSRS reports were decommissioned. New reports were set up in line with the requirements from the business users.
Results
The Sandwell council achieved the following advantages from the project:
• The number of SQL servers was reduced from three to one enabling easier maintenance
• The number of databases as a result of the consolidation resulted in the reduction in the total number to 20 from the previous 76
• The extraction process over night was now taking 3 hours instead of the previous 12 hours
• New reports/alerts were set up to improve data quality across various datasets and sources
enquiries@datacure.co.uk
www.datacure.co.uk