Partner Article

Two thirds of A&Es ‘miss winter wait time target’ – it’s time for change

Last week we saw that the NHS is struggling to meet targets on patient care. The NHS is one of the largest organisations anywhere in the world and the multiple functions it has to process can make your head spin.

The healthcare sector, in particular, could glean fundamental insights from the masses of data it produces every day. It could use that knowledge to improve its systems and practices – and meet its targets for patient care.

This is the second time in as many months that we’ve seen newspaper headlines about failures of the UK’s National Health Service. And it undermines the great work that is done in hospitals around the country. While some issues are often over-hyped by the papers, there are very real problems with the way our health service operates.

The fact that two thirds of A&Es have missed the winter wait time target of seeing 95% of patients in four hours is telling. Especially as the most recent winter was mild by British standards and didn’t see such high levels of illness as previous years. Yet just 52 out of 144 type one trusts achieved their target. To have seen 92.9% of patients within the target time shows that average care levels are still high…but not high enough.

Add this to news earlier this year about the backlog of patients at Belfast’s Victoria hospital, along with issues at Cardiff’s University Hospital with an influx of A&E patients. While the severity of these two stories is rare, two thirds of trusts have failed to meet the targets set. This is proof that action is required.

The NHS is a relentless producer of big data. Efficiently collecting and analysing it will show NHS trusts that there are no ‘secrets’ to improving healthcare; everything they need is at their feet…they just need to decipher it.

Inaccurate, unreliable, fragmented and outdated information can have a big impact on patient care.

Big data analytics in public healthcare will inform better patient care guidelines in hospitals and identify the risk factors involved in certain treatments. It will enable intervention and prevention of illnesses. It will create integrated patient care across GPs, social services and hospitals. It will minimise follow-ups and improve long-term outpatient care. It will relieve the financial strain on the service.

Prevention is a big opportunity for improvement in the NHS. SAS recently carried out research, which discovered that one in 10 people headed to hospital for treatment when a visit to the doctor would have sufficed.

The NHS needs to combine analysis of its own data with external factors like the time of the year, weather and local social conditions. This bigger picture is crucial for prevention and better forecasting of demand, which would allow the NHS to better allocate resources including staff and beds.

According to the CEBR report, ‘Data Equity – Unlocking the value of big data’, the use of big data analytics across the healthcare sector could deliver additional revenues of £14 billion from 2012 to 2017. Big data analytics will not solve these problems overnight, but it offers the best solution yet.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by David Downing, Director of Health .