Case study: Apollo enables improved healthcare for two million Londoners
Data extraction service takes information from over 300 practices, providing a complete patient history
The background
The North West London Collaboration of Clinical Commissioning Groups (NWL) is made up of eight CCGs and over 360 GP practices.
The CCGs work closely with NHS providers and local authority organisations in order to improve healthcare services for 2.3 million residents across eight London boroughs.
The CCGs are currently undertaking a programme called Whole Systems Integrated Care (WSIC), designed to unify fragmented and inefficient care provision across the boroughs, particularly for patients with long-term conditions.
The aim is to create a single record for each patient, using information from a range of care providers involved in an individual’s treatment. This, not only enables a more joined-up approach to patient treatment; but also feeds into large-scale analytics engines for the development of more-effective care and more-precise risk management.
The collaboration sought a data management partner to extract patient information from hundreds of GP practices across the region for feeding into the WSIC service, and put out a public tender to choose this partner.
Following a successful proof of concept, Apollo, part of connected health specialist, Wellbeing Software, won the tender in February 2016 to provide data management services to the WSIC programme.
Apollo’s data extraction service takes information from over 300 practices across eight CCGs, providing a complete patient history for READ-coded events recorded in primary care settings along with prescriptions and demographics controlled by age filters. Data is provided in a uniform format for both EMIS and TPP GP systems.
The data is then transferred and stored in a data warehouse, with all processes governed by the WSIC Information Sharing Agreement (ISA). This legal document ensures that patient information is stored and used legally and in line with national data security and management standards.
The benefits
The GP data provided by Apollo is linked with patient activity data from acute, community, mental health and social care settings, along with costing information to support movement towards capitated budgets for new models of care and to support population health analysis and pathway redesigning to ensure better care is provided to NWL residents. A set of analytics dashboards are made available to participating clinicians, care professionals and managers across a number of care settings, assisting in managing risk in a more-pro-active way.
This proven and successful extraction of patient data from a huge range of GP clinical systems is therefore the driver, not only for more-integrated and efficient care across the boroughs, but also for more effective population research. This ultimately drives more tailored and cost-effective care.
Apollo has established an excellent relationship with NWL and is successfully delivering data management services as contracted with a greater than 98% success rate.
Kavitha Saravanakumar, deputy director of Business Intelligence (NWL CCGs) overseeing the WSIC programme, said: “The primary care/GP record is absolutely critical to an integrated care record.
“A patient’s journey starts with primary care and this data forms the master patient index for WSIC, data from all other care settings are then joined to this dataset to create an integrated care record.
“Without Apollo we wouldn’t be able to access the patient records in the EMIS and TPP systems. Our ISA is very explicit, in that we have to ensure that patients who have opted out are not contacted and sensitive codes are not accessed.”
