New Health Foundation programme selects 12 projects to improve analytical capability in health and care services

The Health Foundation has selected 12 projects from across the UK to take part in the first round of its new £1.2 million Advancing Applied Analytics programme.

The programme aims to improve analytical capability in support of health and care services. It supports analysts who are working on local innovative and ambitious projects, to help them demonstrate improvements to analytical capability in health and care services and provide lessons for the wider care system.

This programme is an integral part of the Health Foundation’s work on data analytics and follows on from our report Understanding analytical capability in health care that states good quality analysis and the ability to use information effectively is an essential element in any health care system.

The projects are from a combination of care providers and commissioners and will be working on a broad range of areas, including: using predictive analysis to prevent mental health crisis, linking health and local government data at household level to understand social determinants of health and testing the use of new measures of frailty in GP practices.

Each round of the programme will run for 15 months and each project team will receive up to £100,000 of funding to support the implementation, evaluation and dissemination of findings from their work. The projects will start in January 2018.

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

The projects are:

1. Modelling elective pathways across the Devon health economy to better inform strategic STP decision making

Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust

2. Applied analytics development programme

NHS South Central and West Commissioning Support Unit

3. Developing a community of practice around capacity planning for the Kent & Medway STP

Kent County Council

4. Making sense of a sea of data: The Royal Derby Hospital bioinformatics training programme

Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

5. Applying analytics and information management in health and care

2gether NHS Foundation Trust

6. Building an analytical framework around the Electronic Frailty Index to transform care for people living with frailty

Midlothian Health and Social Care Partnership

7. Using predictive analysis to prevent mental health crisis

Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust

8. Surrey health and social Care Analytics Linked Ecosystem (SCALE): Visualising patterns of need and care

Surrey County Council 

9. Linking health and local government data at household level to understand social determinants of health

London Borough Islington

10. Monitoring routes to cancer diagnosis performance indicators in GP practices in Northern Ireland

Business Services Organisation 

11. Establishing an NHS-R community to exploit the power of R for the NHS

Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (Yorkshire & Humber AHSN Improvement Academy)

12. Antimicrobials in hospitals – a development of advanced ePrescribing analytics

University Hospital of Southampton NHS Trust