How a spreadsheet became a platform

The first line was a spreadsheet

Every story has a first line. Ours was a spreadsheet.

In 2015/16, primary care in Tower Hamlets was awash with dashboards nobody opened. NIS performance data arrived as a stream of oversized spreadsheets — heavy on email, light on insight — and the changes that actually mattered were nearly impossible to see across NIS areas.

So we tried something deliberately simple. Instead of sending the spreadsheet, we published it: embedded live on a web page, open to every constituent practice, at any hour, with no login in the way. It was a small idea with an outsized effect — visits climbed almost immediately, and the principle it proved has anchored everything since. The original workbook is embedded below, exactly as it first appeared.

The workbook that began it all — published, not emailed.

From document to product

A static sheet answered “what is the data?”. The next one had to answer “what does it mean?”

In 2016/17 we rebuilt the dashboard as something interactive — charts, graphs and visual summaries that let a practice read its position at a glance rather than decode a grid of numbers. This first interactive version had no dedicated address yet, and stayed within Network 2 while we learned what worked. It was the moment the dashboard stopped being a document and started becoming a product.

Widening the lens

With the format proven, we widened the lens.

Through 2017/18 the dashboard grew beyond core NIS metrics to take in e-Consult, population trends and patient access — a fuller picture of how practices were really working. We refined the visuals on every page, and as our command of data transformation matured, refresh times fell. The dashboard was becoming something colleagues relied on, not just something they consulted.

Hello, Tower Hamlets

Good tools travel. Ours started to.

By 2018/19, what began as a Network 2 project was drawing interest from across the borough. Rather than keep it in-house, we opened it to every Network in Tower Hamlets — a single shared resource serving practices, Networks and CCG reporting alike. We relaunched it under the newly formed GP Care Group with a complete visual refresh, and the response brought fresh appetite for reporting well beyond NIS. Wider reach meant heavier lifting, but we carried it forward as a genuinely borough-wide asset.

Automation under the hood

Growth exposed the seams. The answer was automation.

The 2019/20 release added more reporting areas and gave colleagues practical tools for their quarterly CCG returns — but the real change was invisible to most users. We replaced a heavily manual transformation process with a purpose-built Python pipeline, cutting refresh time dramatically and, just as importantly, freeing us to build rather than maintain. The pipeline was sharpened continually alongside the BIU team. Pulling data still meant extracting from eight separate Network EMIS accounts by hand — a bottleneck we were determined to solve next.

Sharpening the craft

With the pipeline in place, we spent a year getting better at the details.

2020/21 was refinement rather than reinvention. Python processing and ClicData remained the backbone, while the dashboards themselves gained richer features and more considered visuals. Each iteration made the same data easier to read, act on and trust — the quiet, compounding work that turns a useful tool into an indispensable one.

The leap we never looked back from

Then came the change that redefined what a dashboard could be.

In 2021/22 we brought Power BI into the platform for the first time — and never looked back. Paired with a custom, dedicated website built around Power BI embeds, we could finally move past the performance figures into the context around them: support-team information, contract specifications, EMIS data-flow guidance and more, delivered through structured templates and searches. The dashboard became a knowledge platform — somewhere to understand the system, not just measure it.

From practitioners to teachers

Momentum turned into expertise — and expertise started to travel.

As our Power BI capability deepened through 2022/23, the platform's reputation reached beyond Tower Hamlets. The PCND team published dashboards for CEG at QMUL, and went on to deliver Power BI training to their data analysts — a measure of how far the practice had come, from embedding a spreadsheet to teaching the craft to others.

Maturity, and its edges

Maturity is its own kind of progress — and its own kind of signal.

2023/24 was a year of consolidation and steady growth: more reporting, wider adoption, and a platform doing its job well across the borough. But maturity brings clarity. The more we asked of an embed-based model, the more we could feel its edges — and the ambition was beginning to outgrow the tools carrying it.

Meeting the ceiling

Every platform eventually meets its ceiling. We had found ours.

By 2024/25 the Power BI platform was mature, trusted and widely used — and we understood its limits precisely because we'd pushed it so far. Delivering the experience we now wanted — faster, more integrated, more tailored to how PCNs actually work — meant stepping beyond embeds and templates. The case for building something of our own had become impossible to ignore.