Demystifying Data in Healthcare

Written By Rebecca Eastmond

By Erin Das, Practice Lead at Global Treehouse

When people think about data and quality improvement in healthcare, their minds often jump to complex statistics, databases and analysts. If you don't feel like a data expert or haven't spent years in formal quality improvement roles, the prospect can feel intimidating.

But after several years of working with diverse teams worldwide, I've realised the most valuable part of measuring service quality isn't the technical architecture. What's usually missing is the habit: asking questions that matter, using information to find answers and deciding what to do differently.

Why Data Matters

In healthcare, and especially in paediatric palliative care, we spend our days talking to families and navigating incredibly complex situations with children who have serious illnesses. We pour ourselves into the care we provide, and we often find ourselves saying things like, "I think families are struggling with this," or "It feels like our referrals are going up."

Those gut feelings are vital, but data gives us another lens. Such data helps us move from "I think this is happening" to "let's see if we can actually understand the reality." My goal is always to help teams ask: Is there something we could do differently to better support these children and families? Numbers on their own change nothing; what we do with them can transform care. To show you what this looks like in practice, here are four examples of teams using information to drive meaningful change.

Systematising Family Feedback in Kenya

The first example is from a team in Kenya, with a programme that had a deep well of knowledge and over a decade of experience. They were already responding to feedback, mostly through casual, day-to-day conversations between staff and families. Together, we realised the programme lacked a consistent, formal way to capture that feedback. The programme staff hadn't looked at the collective picture yet. We can all relate to this — it's hard to spot broader patterns from isolated anecdotes alone.

The team reviewed global frameworks and adapted an existing family feedback survey (the George Mark Children's House Patient Family Survey) to fit their needs. Crucially, this Kenyan hospice didn't just recycle the survey wholesale. They asked: What actually matters to our families? What do we need to know? What language feels right for our setting? We collaborated to refine the survey for their context and deployed it with over 15 families. They had real data to analyse together to see where they could improve. The survey wasn't just an end product; it started a new conversation. It was simple and has now evolved into a second project to translate the survey into the local language. That cycle of learning and changing—that's what improvement looks like.

The Power of One Simple Number in Eswatini

In Eswatini, a team runs a vibrant psychosocial support service through hospital playrooms for children on long-term treatment. Because they focus on play therapy rather than medical procedures, they weren't routinely recording much clinical or service data. But like many NGOs, they have to show donors the value of their work to keep going. They kept coming back to the same question: How do we explain the impact of what we do?

During a conversation about service metrics, we looked for one simple piece of information that could change the conversation. The answer? Attendance. Just counting how many children walked through the door, no complex metrics. Instead of telling a donor, "Our playroom is really busy," they could say, "We had 15 children yesterday and 70 visits this month—we've seen a steady increase." These simple numbers also help them manage internally, showing whether they need more resources or should shift staff hours to busier days.

Unravelling the Data You Already Have

Sometimes the problem isn't that we don't have enough data, but that we're collecting the same information in too many different places.

One outpatient clinic in the Middle East tracked appointments in three places: an Outlook calendar, a nurse's tracking sheet and the patient's online chart. They had plenty of data, but at the end of the month, the numbers never matched up. It was frustrating and led to constant questions about which source was actually right. Instead of collecting even more data, the team stepped back and asked: How are we even doing this?

The clinic team found fragmented processes and simple human errors. As they reflected on a potential change project, improvement wasn't about new metrics; it was about streamlining the work and building a system they could actually trust. The team took these insights back to leadership and created a plan to streamline documentation between the clinical and administrative teams. Before you look for something new to measure, take a look at what you're already doing.

Finding the Right Time to Ask

Two teams in the Asia-Pacific region wanted to understand the quality of their care while children were still in their care. Given the reality of children’s palliative care, assessing care quality after care would overlap with bereavement.  

In our field, we often wait until bereavement to ask families for their thoughts on the quality of our care, because many situations are so sensitive. This feedback is vital, but real-time insights let us make immediate changes that benefit the family now. This team decided to implement the PRECIOUS Instrument, a validated tool for tracking parent experiences throughout the illness journey. Any team in pediatric palliative care can use this shared resource to gather feedback from families on the quality of care their children receive from their care teams.

Approach for the Journey

If you're thinking about bringing a bit more data into your own work, here are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Embrace the surprises: When we're busy, it's easy to operate on assumptions. Data will either confirm what you already feel or surprise you—and both are valuable. If it confirms your gut, you have evidence; if it surprises you, you have a new question to explore. A surprise isn't a failure; it's an opportunity to learn.

  • Don't wait for perfect conditions: We rarely work in "perfect" environments. If you wait for a flawless IT system or a week of protected time, you'll never start. Just start where you are, with what you have.

  • Start small: Don't try to solve every crisis at once. Pick one burning question that matters to your staff or families. Use existing tools so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

  • Do it together: Evaluation shouldn't be an isolated job for one person. Involve your colleagues and ask what they want to understand. Data can help us see patterns, but people help us interpret what those patterns mean—and you need both.

Teams who prioritize and lean into this work become genuinely curious about their service information and data. They realise that improvement isn't some terrifying monolith; it's simply saying: "Let's try something. Let's see what happens. Let's learn from it." So, start with a question rather than the numbers. Be curious, and celebrate the small discoveries. You don't need to have all the answers at the start—you're going to learn as you go.

Learn about the Magnify Tool 

One key way we support teams to use their data in practical ways is with the Magnify Tool, co-created by and for children’s palliative care providers. Learn more here: 

Rebecca Eastmond
Next

Global Treehouse Advisors Continue to Drive Transformative Change (Updated)