Inspiring improvement in value for money
Achieving higher quality for lower costs is a priority across the health service and we are therefore placing more emphasis on this across all of our work.
We are working with award holders help them gain a better understanding of the costs of implementing their improvement projects and the extent to which the improvement intervention may reduce costs of provision through, for example:
- reducing length of stay
- more efficient use of staff time
- reducing use of health services through ongoing support using technology such as the internet and mobile phones.
We want to encourage all those working in healthcare to see improving value for money as an integral part of the wider challenge to improve the quality of care for patients. Evidence shows that deficiencies in quality and safety increase the costs of healthcare, but we don’t yet have clear evidence to demonstrate how improvement at scale can reduce these costs.
Shine programme
Through our Shine programme we are continuing to support small scale projects that aim to improve quality while reducing costs. The results of the first round have led to considerable interest, with projects being nominated for several awards for innovation and efficiency.
We are working with those completing projects in 2012 on dissemination plans to include submissions to the QIPP (Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention) evidence base, putting in for HSJ and other national awards, supporting local dissemination events and sessions at appropriate professional conferences.
Socio-technical approach to resources
We are aiming to make an important contribution to the tools and approaches available to the new Clinical Commissioning Groups in England, and health service planners in the rest of the UK, by developing a suite of products based on the socio-technical approach to prioritising the use of resources pioneered by the research team at LSE (which was successfully piloted by the Isle of Wight PCT in 2009 and Sheffield PCT in 2010).
Work is underway with PricewaterhouseCoopers to develop a data analysis tool and training module which will be available as free resources to the NHS by the summer.
Health economics research
To help improve our understanding of value for money at the level of health systems we are continuing to fund health economics research with Peter Smith at Imperial College, Gwyn Bevan at the London School of Economics and Luke Vale at University of Newcastle.
The Imperial research programme will continue to investigate how disease management affects mortality, using evidence from QOF (Quality and Outcomes Framework) and HES (Hospital Episode Statistics) data sets.
A new area of work is the interdependence between hospital mortality and readmission rates. Using advanced econometric methods the team are looking at the extent to which conventional cost measures, such as length of stay or reference costs, offer meaningful indicators of value for money.
The LSE team are further developing modelling techniques to inform strategic choices in healthcare. A particular clinical area of focus will be the burden of disease from increased alcohol consumption, working with the National Clinical Director for Liver Disease.
