Achieving Clinical Outcomes With Results That Really Matter

Published Article: Health Business Magazine October 2010

John Morley, CEO at Formic explores the challenges and benefits of clinical audit and revalidation following the measures outlined in the Government’s Whitepaper: Liberating the NHS.

John Morley is CEO at Formic – the leading developer of data capture solutions for the NHS, helping to efficiently collect, manage and analyse data for clinical audit and revalidation. Customers range from physicians and administration personnel through to Clinical Governance Departments working on some of an NHS Trust’s most complex auditing projects.

The company has 20 years’ of experience and its software is in daily use by more than 300 NHS Trusts, Primary Care Trusts, Mental Health Trusts, Strategic Health Authorities and private healthcare organisations across the UK.

ACCURATE, EFFICIENT AND COST EFFECTIVE DATA CAPTURE

Formic recognises the importance of the changes outlined in the Government’s White Paper, Equity and Excellence: Liberation the NHS and their experience has led them to believe that accurate, efficient and cost-effective information capture, management and sharing will soon play a critical role as an enabling factor for many of the changes outlined.

John Morley, CEO, Formic, explains: “This whitepaper outlines radical changes which will need to take place within NHS Trusts. Patients will become at the heart of everything that a Trust will do and there will be much more emphasis on research and analysis to help increase productivity and efficiency within the Service. At the same time the NHS is asked to improve its efficiency with the goal of reducing management costs by 45% over the next four years.

CLINICAL AUDIT HAS ENORMOUS POTENTIAL

Compared to other sectors, healthcare is in its infancy in putting the customer first. Accurate information is pivotal to better care, better outcomes and reduced costs. Clinical audit has a key role to play in achieving this as it extends its application to include patient feedback as part of the process that systematically reviews outcomes of care against explicit criteria and the implementation of change.

Achieving unprecedented gains in efficiency, combined with the Government’s Whitepaper directive to demonstrate a “relentless focus on clinical outcomes … with results that really matter” will drive a requirement for Trusts to automate their data capture and, with the removal of PCT’s and many middle management, place accountability of this in the hands of the Clinician.

The new measures that will empower patients to rate hospitals and clinical departments, according to the quality of care they receive, will also require hospitals to be open about mistakes and inform patients if anything goes wrong.

DATA FOR ACCOUNTABILITY AND CLINICALLY USEFUL

Complete data capture will be at the point of care, information will be clear and more importantly, medically accurate, helping to meet the rigor of clinical audit and revalidation, both of which will help inform decisions on quality improvement and promote patient involvement. This will motivate a shift in recognition that the data needed for accountability will be the same data that is clinically useful.

Information generated by patients themselves will also be critical to the process and by the Government’s own admission; it is not something that the NHS has been historically good at. More wide spread use of “effective tools” like Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs), patient experience data, and real time feedback will be expanded to support clinicians across a much wider range of treatments and conditions, and it will extend PROMs across the NHS wherever practicable.

The Whitepaper suggests that more PROMs will be developed for other surgical and non-surgical procedures. In the future they will be designed for routine use as part of day-to-day patient care, and ultimately it will be possible to evaluate the pathway of care for each patient, from start to finish from GP surgery or A&E, through to post-operative and at-home care.

The challenge with these programmes is that significantly more information will needed to be collected at a time when the NHS is targeted at reducing the administrative resources that would typically be responsible for capturing and processing this information.

The implication for NHS Trusts is that they will need to innovate in the way that they do this, moving away from the outdated and longwinded methods currently being used and applying up-to-date solutions and systems to what has historically been labour intensive activities.

Clinical audit departments and the like will see a dramatic increase in both the volume and breadth of support they are expected to provide without receiving a corresponding increase in resources. Given the scope of these requirements Trusts will likely seek to identify an overall approach for the electronic capture and processing of outcome and clinical audit data.

Already at Formic we are seeing an increasing demand amongst our existing NHS customers to move from traditional paper based information capture systems to our electronic solutions that utilise modern devices such as touch screens, patient kiosks, clinical assistant PCs, Personal Digital Assistants, Smartphones and the web. These enable the whole process of information capture to be more efficient and accessible by clinicians and patients alike.

Formic’s range of solutions already provide many NHS organisations with these capabilities. As well as facilitating the capture of information on the front line in real time, they also provide tools to assist with consolidation, analysis and reporting, leading to much faster feedback to clinicians, trust management and patients. With the accompanying reduction in manual effort, professional staff are able to focus on using the information to drive improvement in clinical outcomes.

As the Whitepaper admits “too often the patients are expected to fit around the services, rather than the services around the patient.” Getting the right, proven solutions in place will help towards achieving a patient-led, accessible service that will go a long way in helping the NHS deliver the productivity and efficiency to which it aspires.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Visit: www.formic.co.uk Tel: 0870 197 5608 Email: sales@formic.co.uk