By CEO and Founder of Quantexa, Vishal Marria
Every interaction with a clinician results in the generation of new or modified patient data.
That’s a lot of data if you consider the fact that according to data from NHSE, the NHS sees about 1.3 million people a day. That’s equal to the entire population of Estonia.
With these vast datasets comes great responsibility – and great opportunity. This data has the potential to be used to not only better patient outcomes, predict patterns in behaviours and support in clinical breakthroughs, but to improve operational and financial efficiency.
The sad truth, however, is that only 3% of hospitals make use of the 50 petabytes of data they produce each year. According to the World Economic Forum, as much as 97% of this data is unused and completely siloed from the services’ operations.
It’s for this reason that in the run up to the UK General Election on 4th July, all eyes will be on the level of investment prospective government parties are willing to put into technology, to harness the abundance of NHS data and use it for positive outcomes. With the health system in trouble, more people are looking for tools that help our NHS Trusts to be more productive and to drive operational change.
With the right investment, trusts will be able to introduce strong data and analytics technology that processes, interprets and sorts the mass amounts of data they account for. The process is already being used to transform organisations’ relationship with their data across industries and can do the same for healthcare. But it’s no easy feat. To be successful, trusts need to create habits and processes that allow for the data to be optimally used going forward. This means treating the raw data with the significance it holds so that the sorted data can be understood for making data-driven decisions.
Entity resolution creates a 360 view of data
The UK government’s data programme, the Federated Data Platform, is currently underway to support the NHS in analysing data at a large scale.
It’s a unique opportunity to help the NHS create an accurate, fast, open and secure data platform with a 360 view of patient records. I believe that leveraging the efficiency and innovation of technology leaders in healthcare can support the sector in reaching underserved communities – by using advanced technology to improve the focus on proactive, preventative and individualized care – that puts patients in control of their own care too.
The perennial challenge for NHS Trusts is connecting disparate data siloes together to create a “Patient 360” concept.
This is where Decision Intelligence (DI) comes in which allows organizations to unify data, create context from that data, and augment and automate decision making for actionable insights. Applying Entity Resolution technology to this challenge is critical in helping us to do this, because it aims to provide a comprehensive, holistic view of a patients’ health by aggregating and integrating data from various sources. Providing a complete, unified, and secure profile of an individual patient that includes their medical history, clinical data, lab results, medication records and much more is vital in improving clinical decision making, enhancing care coordination, providing personalized medicine and leveraging analytics and insights.
Most importantly, it helps to empower patient engagement so that each of us can actively participate in our care decisions and the management of our own health. Entity Resolution technology plays a significant role by gaining insights from 360-degree longitudinal patient records enhanced with accurately linked social determinants of health data, helping target vital resources to better support the highest at-risk people with complex health and social care needs.
Digital transformation efforts right now need to focus on creating automated workflows and allowing more integrated ways of working. High quality data and analytics can do both, while reducing the waitlists and optimising patient outcomes.
Improving patient outcomes with data-led modernisation programmes
There are lots of examples of how data can be applied within the NHS. But one of the things I’m most passionate about, is the impact it can have – when used correctly – on patient outcomes.
To give an example of this in action, it was recently announced that the University of Liverpool’s Civic Health Innovation Labs (CHIL) and partners, will use a £4.9 million award from the Office for Life Sciences (OLS) to make better, quicker decisions from Integrated Care System data.
Working with our partners on this project, we’re able to improve care by making contextual data more accessible to providers and patients.
In essence, we’re building a trusted data foundation to develop better drug and digital therapies, as well as to better co-ordinate care services to tackle global challenges in mental health, including increasing levels of illness. And this is just one example of what is possible when there is a trusted data foundation in place.
The NHS is one of the largest employers in the world. So, it’s understandable that its data challenge is a complex one. Undergoing the data transformation that the NHS needs is no small task. That said, the chance to better connect the siloed pool of NHS Trusts’ data and understand its impact must start somewhere. Both operational efficiency and patient outcomes – and the health of the UK population – can be improved if we start looking at the data and putting it to work.
