Recent HSJs

Having trouble keeping this up to date!

Here are some recent snippets from HSJ...

22 April issue included a supplement on informatics to coincide with HC2010. Most interesting is an article about North Bristol NHS Trust's approach to a data warehousing/business intelligence solution. They opted to build a solution inhouse as they felt there wasn't an off-the-peg solution which suited. There may be some lessons to learn here for our own data warehouse project. North Bristol have over 1000 users for the new system which equates to 1 in 9 of the Trust’s employees. The data warehouse pulls information in from 30 existing IT systems.

13 May has an article on NHS Evidence and how it can support the quality and productivity agenda. Part of the problem is that there is little evidence around the impact of commissioning. There is a recognition that there needs to be more clinical input to commissioning decisions and that more use could be made of tools out there, e.g. NHS Institute's Better Care Better Value indicators. The roundtable discussion concluded the NHS must look at innovation and quality but keeping cost in mind. They also predicted that in future, there will be more emphasis on information for patients (and the coalition government has suggested more patient-friendly performance information). The role of accreditation in highlighting guidance based on robust evidence is discussed– participants saw this as important so clinicians and managers understand the strength of evidence on which guidance is based. They also talked about a fear of spreading and implementing evidence due to increased cost pressures so predicted future decision making will have to balance cost to benefit as well as patient outcomes - NHS Evidence is developing as a tool to support decision-making but I suspect awareness is still quite low on the ground.