Athena - Collaborative intelligence to improve health and care

Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) have been tasked with improving population health outcomes, reducing health inequalities and delivering services efficiently and affordably within their local area.

Achieving this requires a joined-up approach to capturing, analysing and using data and analytics that supports decision-making and targets interventions where they are needed most. But existing practices are often fragmented, difficult to navigate and too complex to inform strategy and planning.

To efficiently identify, analyse and address the healthcare needs of their populations, ICS stakeholders need a collaborative, intuitive data and analytics platform that enables high-level analysis through to individual patient care.

The Athena solution

Athena is a strategic data and analytics platform using cloud-based technologies to bring separate data sources, flows and reporting together in one place creating a single source of the truth.

Athena:

• Integrates modern tooling and practices for clear data visualisation and storytelling across the entire analytics value chain
• Manages authentication through the OKTA platform to enable secure access on any device, anywhere, at any time for nhs.net, nhs.uk, and gov.uk users
• Provides seamless integration with national analytical toolkits
• Facilitates collaboration across the analytics workforce through a single publication route with all system stakeholders able to curate and publish content
• Is accessible to those working in a range of roles including executives, directors, service leads, analysts, developers and, crucially, clinicians
• Replaces the myriad of existing analytics platforms under one more cost effective model
• Is co-designed with practitioners to make a direct impact on patient care.

A collaborative approach to content

Athena empowers analysts to co-create and publish analytical content, regardless of organisation, skillset or technical toolkit – with support, training and guidance in place to ensure content is high quality, consistent and non-repetitive.

Local content is complemented by a series of dashboards in high priority areas, developed by our business intelligence reporting experts, including:

1. Population health management – segmenting and risk stratifying the population into distinct groups to identify differing health and wellbeing needs, as well as inequalities, enabling tailored care models
2. Diabetes – highlighting the prevalence, risk factors and impact of diabetes within a selected geographical area
3. Ageing well – exploring the unique challenges faced by dementia, end-of-life and 24-hour care dependent patients
4. Cancer – giving greater insight into service delivery and the patient pathway to improve patient experience and outcomes
5. Urgent and emergency care – improving understanding of potential avoidable admissions to an emergency department
6. Recovery of planned care services – insights into current and projected bottlenecks in the planned care system.

We work collaboratively with each of our clients to agree a programme of dashboard development that meets the needs of system partners while utilising reporting best practice and sharing concepts across ICSs. Planned development over the next 12 months includes dashboards in mental health, maternity, primary care (appointments, DES and QOF), care homes, readmissions and contract monitoring.

Supporting population health management

Athena gives you the intelligence you need to answer questions about your population and make better decisions about their care.

Alongside traditional NHS content (performance, commissioning, contracting etc.), Athena tackles population health challenges including population variation, inequality and risk, distilling these into actionable cohorts of patients who would benefit from intervention.

Athena enables patient-facing services to be planned and delivered in a completely different way by:

• Supporting an integrated approach to patient care through a broader and richer population dataset
• Bringing together descriptive and prescriptive analytics so that decision makers can understand the potential impact of targeting a particular patient segment or introducing a new intervention
• Identifying frequent users of health and care services earlier so that collaborative interventions, such as community support from the third sector or social prescribing, can be deployed to prevent further use.

By facilitating collaboration, promoting modern tooling and practices, and focusing on both population-level and individual patient needs, the platform enables decision-making and the delivery of targeted interventions, ultimately contributing to improved population health.