Using data to understand what’s going on and to prioritise improvements
Your data must take you somewhere.
It must support and inspire you to improve.
It’s very easy to get things ‘Precisely Wrong’. Getting to ‘Approximately Correct’ is harder but so much more worthwhile and exciting. Supporting you to do that is our ambition.
If you’ve done recent Population Health Management work and it doesn’t inspire you and make it clear what to do next, then you’ve been focussing too much energy on the wrong things.
Let’s rethink.
The challenge
The information is contained in general practices’ clinical systems is hugely rich and powerful. However, practices have a low likelihood of looking at it in a systematic way. Why is this? It seems to be a combination of lack of time; a lack of the right tools and not knowing its potential.
As they stand, clinical systems (EMIS, SystmOne, etc) are very poor at analytics - or even basic reporting for that matter. Practices are left on their own and even basic questions take some work to get right.
What sort of ‘basic questions’ are you talking about?
A core set of questions covers what we feel any organisation should know about its operation - what is our resource exactly? How many appointments, how much time do we offer? Does it go where we want it to? What are the ‘quick wins’ vs longer-term improvements that we need to make?
Some examples of core data knowledge a practice should have:
Exactly how many appointments do we offer, what the mix, how has it changed through time?
Who are our most regular attenders? What different groups are there within them?
Do we provide GP continuity? In general? What about specific groups of patients or conditions?
How much repeat work and looping are we doing?
Which patients haven’t we seen for a long time? What about patients with known multiple co-morbidities that we aren’t seeing regularly?
Where are the key variations between our clinicians? Do we discuss them to learn from each other?
Which chronic conditions take relatively more vs. less of our time?
And for all of these:
How do we compare to other practices in our PCN, in the CCG, regionally, nationally or any or all of the above questions?
Where can the PCN help us the most?
The good news
Each of the above questions can be answered clearly with the data already within the clinical systems.
Data stimulates questions and challenges how primary care is organising to meet needs. Once ‘how we do things around here’ is made clear, practices, PCNs and CCGs need the relationships and tools to make change. The PCN Academy provides those tools and develops those relationships.
Data tools
Some of the tools we are most passionate about:
Access and appropriateness audit and diary – a mirror for the practice to view itself and discuss
Resource analysis and attendance skew – an inspiring business review of the practice
Targeted continuity – a quick fix to free up 1,500 appointments
Measures that matter – the 10 measures that can actually take you somewhere
We’ll share more details of all of these over the coming months.
And some post-lockdown questions for a practice to ask itself
Has the patterns of appointments at the practice returned to previous levels?
Have the ‘usual suspects’ returned? Do you have a fresh approach and commitment to working differently with them?
Have you embedded your new experiences and skills with digital and telephone triage into everyday work to help navigate and prioritise work?