GP practices and PCNs in two Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) are now able to better understand the impact of their health interventions thanks to a powerful new evaluation tool.
Athena Rapid Evaluation enables clinical and operational managers in Mid and South Essex ICS and Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes ICS to quickly and simply generate evidence-based insights, supporting smarter planning and investment decisions.
Combining advanced statistical techniques – propensity score matching and differences-in-differences analysis – the tool generates a fair comparison group and then highlights changes in healthcare activity between the comparator group and the patient cohort receiving the intervention. This includes A&E attendances, emergency admissions and primary care appointments as well as the financial implications of these changes.
The tool’s developers worked with experts in data linkage, analysis and visualisation, and clinical reference groups to ensure Athena Rapid Evaluation is user-friendly, clinically validated and meets the needs of stakeholders.
GP and Chief Clinical Information Officer, Dr Nick Pulman, said: “Using linked data sets to proactively identify patients at risk has already transformed our ability, as GPs, to create and manage successful population health projects. Athena Rapid Evaluation is to some extent the missing link.
“We have seen amazing developments in risk prediction and patient identification but lacked the ability to prove whether projects work and demonstrate their financial viability to commissioners. I look forward to working with the Athena team as part of their ongoing development cycle to bring clinical measures and patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) into the tool so that we can extend its unique capability to more projects and more users.”
The speed and efficacy of the tool was recently tested on an initiative in Bedfordshire to improve health for people with chronic conditions by tackling fuel poverty through the Warm Homes programme.
Elesh Mistry, Population Health Management Analytics Lead, described the process and results: “Working with public health colleagues to evaluate the Warm Homes programme took weeks to scope and deliver using traditional analytical methods. We wanted to see how long the Athena Rapid Evaluation tool would take to process the results and how they would compare to the original evaluation.
“The tool took just thirty minutes to generate an evaluation report, with similar findings. For primary care teams used to waiting months for analytical requests to come back from ICS business intelligence colleagues, this is game-changing. We’re now working through similar use cases with social prescribing and frailty teams.”
With over 300 health and care organisations already using Athena, this new capability strengthens Arden & GEM’s commitment to developing systems and applications that help healthcare professionals to plan and deliver proactive, personalised care.
Find out more about Athena Rapid Evaluation.