Torbay Care Trust has become the first health and social care trust to go live with a pathway analytics and reporting system from MedeAnalytics.
The trust is using the bespoke system as a supplementary service to the UK Performance Network service that MedeAnalytics runs in partnership with the Healthcare Financial Management Association.
The Uk service gives subscribers access to databases and reports on key performance indicators.
The new system enables Torbay to extract data from its existing systems and to create more precise business intelligence that will help it to redesign services in the light of tightened budgets and NHS reform.
Trudy Corsellis, head of business planning and performance at Torbay Care Trust, told E-Health Insider: “We felt there were many disparate information systems in the trust that needed to be brought together in order to fully understand the trust’s finances.
“As health and social care services are prescribed by different organisations throughout the region, we had an assumption that they were potentially being duplicated for a number of patients.
"Therefore, we thought there might be a better way of meeting the needs of those individuals more effectively.”
The trust began implementing the system 15 months ago, but has spent a considerable amount of time refining and validating it to make sure that those making decisions are using accurate information.
Although responsibility for reports is held within Corsellis’s team, which is part of the trust’s provider arm, she says the system is flexible enough to be used by commissioners and clinicians.
“Commissioners are very aware of how much money they are spending with acute hospitals but social care is a bit of an enigma. Now, if a commissioner wants to change a service they’ll ask me and my team to provide the background information to allow that to happen," she said.
The trust now plans to map health and social costs from a high level right down to patient level costing.
It will examine factors such as age and demographics, to determine where there may be a case for service redesign.
It has already analysed statistics for elderly patients who have fallen and demonstrated that the majority are not known to social care before they are admitted to hospital.
Corsellis added: “A lot of the time, such patients end up in residential care, which is very expensive. If there had been more information available, the money could have been spent on better preventative methods.
"Transparent access to NHS costs, viewable alongside social care costs, will help us to put into context the totality of services delivered to this complex group of patients.”
Torbay Care Trust was one of the first integrated adult health and social care organisations to be set up in England. It covers a population of around 140,000 people.
It says its local acute trust, local GP consortia and local authorities are aware of how it is using the BI system, and are interested in implementing similar systems to benchmark their services.
Link: MedeAnalytics