Health Foundation to fund 10 innovative projects aiming to improve analytical capability in health and care services

Each of the projects involve analysts working on innovative, sustainable ideas that will demonstrate the value of analytics in improving health and care. The projects will provide lessons for the wider health and care system, with ideas that can be replicated in other areas or specialisms. 

The Advancing Applied Analytics programme is part of the Health Foundation’s work on data analytics and follows on from our report, Understanding analytical capability in health care, which highlights that good quality analysis and the ability to use information effectively is an essential element in any health care system. The projects chosen to be part of the first round have recently come to an end, with final reports being compiled. The projects from round two are up and running.

The third round projects are from a range of care providers and commissioners from across the UK. In particular, for this round, we have focused on projects will that help senior managers and clinicians understand the value of better analytics, for example using innovative approaches to engage senior staff in data analytics.

Each project will run for up to 15 months and each project team will receive up to £75,000 of funding to support the implementation, evaluation and dissemination of findings from their work. The projects will each start by September 2019.

The selection of these projects is currently subject to contracts being finalised with the lead organisation of each project.

The projects are:

• Harnessing data analytics to maximise NHS learning from patient safety incident reports
  Cardiff and Vale University Health Board
• Improving lesion recognition using routinely collected endoscopic and pathology data
  Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
• Developing the foundations of applied analytics: using a collaborative approach to model ‘black days’
  Hywel Dda University Local Health Board
• From data to decisions: embedding a Real-world Intervention Causal Evaluation (RICE) tool in the decision-making process
  Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group
• Computation of adherence to medicines to assist clinicians in the outpatient setting
  NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
• Optimising complex care pathways for inflammatory rheumatic disease using a practical simulation tool
  Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• Improving the analytical capabilities to support the North Cumbria Population Health Management approach
  North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust
• Development of the Informatics Skills Framework (ISF)
  North West Skills Development Network
• PathAnalyse: Towards the redesign of outpatient services using visual process analytics
  Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• A multidisciplinary analytics action learning set to improve GP appointment systems using discrete event simulation
  The Strategy Unit