Like father, like son: Using digital and data to deliver better health services in Northamptonshire

From making the best use of data to rewarding partnership working, Matthew Hutton gives us the lowdown on the wide variety of work taking place locally in the NHS to help join the digital dots.

As the digital programme lead for the integrated care board in Northamptonshire, I represent all the organisations within the care system - our hospitals, our mental health and community services, our GP practices and our local authorities dealing with social care, extending into registered care homes as well. So I've got a wide remit in terms of how we develop, then deliver digital services across the county. 

I always put myself in the position of my father who worked for Northampton General Hospital as a plumber for many years, because I'm a bit like a plumber in the digital era. I plumb information between organisations rather than making water go into radiators. For both me and my dad, our jobs have really been about having a relationship with health and caring for people. So all of the work we do really intends to improve the health of people in Northamptonshire. 

A couple of weeks ago, I visited 34 GP practices across the north of Northamptonshire in one day. That was to deliver information to the practice managers about our new Northamptonshire Care Record, which has been live since October.

It shares patient information from GP practices with hospitals and clinical professionals across the rest of the system - your community, mental health, hospital and GP information are all being shared across those systems, and we will add your social care details and other things like your results and documents to that shared record as well over time. 

But for now, we've seen 40,000 patients being viewed across Northamptonshire by clinical professionals. Promoting the use of that really helps us to generate time saved from GP practices and hospitals because if you want to find out what kind of medication someone's on and they can't tell you, you ring their GP.

You can imagine the number of phone calls that would take place between hospitals and GPs, district nurses or mental health nurses. Being able to share that record saves a lot of time. 

We're going even further by starting to look at how that record can be shared with pharmacies, which are now doing tests for patients like asthma checks or tests for diabetes. And we're doing work with wheelchair and orthotic services so that people can self-refer for a wheelchair now without having to go to their GP. So there are lots of uses for that data, and my job is really to make sure that those pipes are very safe and they don't leak. People see only the information they need to see to help that patient at that time.

Of course, if you’re collecting data you have a responsibility to use it - because we've been asking people within the healthcare sector to collect data for at least a couple of decades. I lead the project to create an analytics platform, which is going live this month for health and healthcare within Northamptonshire.

That will let us see how effective our healthcare really is. It will allow clinicians to look at their own patients and make predictions about what their health might look like in the next year or so. It will also show what they can do about preventing people ending up in the hospital and at the front door of our A & E. So it's really important that we start to use that data to prevent people from ending up in the hospital sooner than they should. 

We have some amazing algorithms within our dashboards that allow you to look at the chances of hospital admission, the chances of an extended stay in hospital and mortality rates. It all means we are able to plan and deliver better services.

The other good use of that data is to look at the picture for healthcare where you live compared to Northamptonshire as a whole. It’s said that there’s a postcode lottery for lots of different services. And we know that there are inequalities in the way healthcare is delivered. So my role is really to expose some of those inequalities so we can do something about them - whether that’s how living in a rural or an urban area might affect your healthcare, even down to how living on a bus route might affect how healthy you are. 

We have a suite of eight different dashboards for things like smoking prevalence, for diabetes, for multi-morbidities and for looking at deprivation across the county and how that affects healthcare. They allow us to work with our primary care colleagues to target different interventions in specific areas of the county that need more help.

I think that really helps us to break through with some of the harder-to-reach communities and deliver more healthy opportunities through things like social prescribing, which our councils do brilliantly - whether it's offering opportunities to exercise or help with your mental health. We're starting to promote the use of these dashboards with our GPs, because the power here is for people working in healthcare in Northamptonshire to understand their own data and use it to deliver better services. 

We have a very close working relationship with both the councils in Northamptonshire on a couple of things. One area where we've been working with councils is to bring their data into our Northamptonshire Care Record.

That would eventually bring in all social care data, and we expect later this year to have both the information about who's working with you in social care, and anyone who's on a safeguarding action plan within social care as well, so that healthcare professionals can look at their data. Conversely, the social care professionals going into those situations with citizens can look at their health data as well to determine what kind of intervention or service they might need.

The other part where we’re working with the two councils is our programme to digitise registered care homes. We're working towards a target of 80% of care homes having a digital system.

That's really important for us because when you get discharged from hospital into a care home, having that continuity of data and information about you, having that understanding about the outcome of your hospital visit, is really important to the overall understanding about what works. 

It’s even more important to take up a digital system for care homes as the CQC are looking carefully at how a lack of digital affects the overall rating of inspections. I would encourage all registered care home managers, if they haven't already signed up, to take that step now. We offer to pay for half the costs from our digital social care fund, so look out for those opportunities and talk to us if you want to take up an opportunity to build a new digital system for your residents.

Finally, we've been really successful working with Pedro Santos and Paula Love from West Northamptonshire Council, who have done an amazing job to set up an award-winning remote monitoring pilot. This uses a system which allows people, either in their own home or in a care home, to monitor their own health and report back to a central hub within the healthcare system about how healthy they are.

We want to reuse the data we've got within our analytics platform now to identify many more people who we think could be hospitalised in the next year or so to take that opportunity to monitor their health before they get to that stage. 

There’s a lot of opportunity both in predicting what we can do to prevent people from ending up in hospital and remotely monitoring them in the best place for them to be, which is their home or their care home and not hospital. If we can scale that and use the data we've got, we could do something really transformative with remote monitoring.

David BevanDigital Northants stories