The Care Quality Commission will start piloting intelligent data mining software similar to that used by the intelligence service to help it monitor staff and public concerns about NHS services.
The new software from QinetiQ will be trialed over the next three months. It will initially be used on a small scale to analyse information from NHS websites, Patient Opinion, NHS Choices and documents that come from inspectors’ reports and other evaluations.
Richard Hamblin, director of intelligence at the CQC, told eHealth Insider: “A lot of the really good information, particularly in social care, is actually held in what people are saying – and that’s a very difficult thing to access.”
At the moment, a team of five people at the CQC have the job of handling a certain amount of qualitative information. But in an interview with EHI, Hamblin acknowledged that this results in a relatively low level analyse which is difficult to use.
The new software will allow for much more in-depth analysis, allowing the CQC to carry out greater audit control, performance management and system tuning.
In addition, the software has the potential to analyse information shared on social networking sites such as Facebook, twitter and personal blogs.
Hamblin added: “Social media is the sexy bit and it is potentially something we can do.
"What we are interested in is those people speaking with a degree of precision, saying that during the last three weeks they’ve spent in hospital, they’ve never seen a clinician wash their hands – and others agreeing.”
The CQC is about to take on the regulation of many more healthcare bodies. But Hamblin argued that the benefits of new software to help spot problems and target inspections far outweighed the benefits of employing additional staff.
He said: “Even if we were to extend the amount of people [analysts] we had, we would really struggle.
"The first reason being that the cost would be astronomical; realistically it would cost around £2m a year to have a team big enough to deal with all that information and that would just be in salaries."