Athena - Collaborative intelligence to improve health and care

Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) are 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. ICS stakeholders need a collaborative, intuitive digital solution 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. More than 300 health and care organisations are already using Athena to efficiently identify, analyse and address the healthcare needs of their populations.

• 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.

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. We bring 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.

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. There are currently 110 unique reports published in Athena across the following areas:

Population health
Athena gives you the intelligence you need to answer questions about your population and make better decisions about their care. High-risk groups – including people with long term conditions such as diabetes and hypertension – can be identified and managed using data-driven tools including risk stratification, case finding and segmentation. Specific reports help to address health inequalities, advance social prescribing and evaluate end-of-life care services.

Primary care, community and social care
Athena contains a series of reports designed to analyse access and service delivery challenges in primary, community and social care. This includes:

• tracking GP demand
• estimating the impact of appointment caps
• identifying discharged frail patients for community support
• monitoring performance indicators
• and exploring the correlation between A&E and GP access.

Mental health
Athena provides insights into access, flow and referral management in mental health services. This includes aggregating service use for all age groups, examining ED attendance patterns and inpatient trends, and tracking urgent mental health referrals. Health and care systems can also use Athena to access the national Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) to improve monitoring and understanding of patient flow.

Urgent care
Reports focus on high-impact usage and system pressure in urgent care. This includes identifying frequent A&E attenders, tracking performance metrics, analysing condition-specific acute activity trends, predicting hospital bed pressure, assessing potentially avoidable admissions, monitoring falls and fractures, understanding inpatient and emergency presenting conditions, and examining urgent mental health referrals and paramedic workforce impact.

Planned care
As efforts continue to tackle elective care recovery, our report suite enables shared operational intelligence among providers and systems as well as cancer outcomes analysis and visibility on screening coverage.

Performance monitoring
A comprehensive view of data integrity and service effectiveness. From assessing health inequality data quality to tracking diagnostic test demand to monitoring waiting times for key tests.

Contracts and finance
Reports in this area monitor financial compliance and data submissions. This includes tracking provider performance against plans and monitoring the submission status of datasets.

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. Athena users can find out more about existing reports and planned developments on our Future NHS workspace.

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.

Download the Athena brochure.