A new population and person insight report has been launched to enable health and care systems to develop a better understanding of their population to improve service planning and delivery.
The report has been developed by NHS Arden & GEM CSU, NHS England and NHS Improvement, and Outcomes Based Healthcare using national datasets – including secondary care, emergency care, community services and specialised services data – to group patients into segments based on common healthcare needs.
The interactive report, which is based on the Bridges to Health segmentation model, contains a series of views so that users can easily explore and interrogate population segments at a national, regional, system, CCG and PCN level. Views include a population segment overview, with an option to focus in on a specific segment, geographical benchmarking and condition prevalence.
Users can also drill down into acute utilisation and cost by population segment to support service planning and identify cohorts for earlier or different interventions. The tool also provides visualisations by age, ethnicity, deprivation and socio-demographic classification to help highlight segments for further investigation and analysis.
In response to the current pandemic, a COVID-19 view was also developed with the aim of aiding NHS restoration and recovery programmes by helping systems to identify their vulnerable populations who have one or more ‘at risk’ conditions to inform decision-making around shielding and planning for the largest vaccination programme in the history of the NHS.
Sukhmeet Panesar, Deputy Director of Strategy and Development at NHS England and NHS Improvement said: “The NHS generates a huge amount of data which can be used to drive improvements in care and how services are run. By providing health and care systems with data which is grouped by population segments we can support NHS and local authority leaders to plan effective services and interventions based on meeting the healthcare needs, risks and priorities of their patients and citizens.”
Ayub Bhayat, Chief Data Officer at Arden & GEM said: “The population and person insight report acts as a diagnostic tool for every level of the system, enabling commissioners and providers to spot opportunities for further analysis and intervention. By providing a starting point for population health management approaches, we can then work with local areas to refine the model with their local intelligence and benchmark emerging opportunities.”
Dr Nasrin Hafezparast, Chief Clinical Data Officer at Outcomes Based Healthcare said: “The internationally-recognised Bridges to Health segmentation model provides a person-centred approach. By using this approach as the foundation for the new report we can categorise the entire population of 62 million people into eight segments, with 55 subsegment or condition registries on a monthly basis, over the past 4 years. It includes a first ever view of population-level healthy lifespan, or HealthSpan®. The report also incorporates feedback from a wide range of groups including clinicians to ensure the data is meaningful.”
The report, which was launched on 12 February, is freely available to healthcare commissioners and providers within the NHS ViewPoint intelligence tool.
