Priory responds to issue of data collection in King’s Fund 360 report
Date: 13th March 2024
Chief Medical Officer, Adrian Cree, outlines how Priory is improving the collection and application of data to enhance patient care and maximise outcomes.
The recent publication of The King’s Fund Mental Health 360 has highlighted a number of issues. One of these is the collection and application of data in the planning, monitoring and improving of our services. Priory, with the support of our colleagues at MEDIAN Group, who are leading experts in measuring outcome data, has been on a focused journey in terms of data collection and application. We are now two years into this journey defined by two strategies, a data and clinical effectiveness strategy.
When scoping the challenges we faced in 2021, it is interesting to see the similarities to The King’s Fund findings in 2024. We had problems with data integrity, data gaps, the burden on colleagues in terms of data collection, limited value of the data collected to the colleagues themselves, and, finally, all of the above creating challenges in being able to understand variations in services and seeking to improve outcomes for patients.
In the last two years, following our strategic plans and with MEDIAN Group and Priory support from CEOs Dr. André M Schmidt and Rebekah Cresswell, we have made significant progress. We aimed to bring data to the front line with the creation of live dashboards to monitor compliance to each of our ten clinical network care pathways. These went live in 2023. Colleagues can access the dashboards for their patients via the electronic patient record system. We have also created a tool to allow the networks to monitor compliance to the pathway and compare wards and sites across networks. This is rolling out in 2024 and will allow us to support wards with lower compliance and learn from wards with the highest compliance rates. The same tool can create reports for our regional hubs and our quality assurance meetings.
The next phase of the project is to collect more reliable clinical outcome measures. This requires the use of clinical tools that are PROM (patient reported outcome measures) or CROM (clinician reported outcome measures) to gather both subjective and objective measures of clinical change. We have chosen GAD7, PHQ9 (PROM) and BPRS (CROM). The importance of reliable data without data gaps is paramount in this and paired data is a minimum for useful clinical outcome data.
However, we aim from the start to create tools that will allow front-line clinical colleagues to create graphs on the outcome data. We think it is of paramount importance that we bring data back to the people contributing to it. Patients should be able to see their progress during their admission and graphs can really help facilitate multi-disciplinary team discussion with the patient. Colleagues should get feedback on their care of the patient and networks should be able to use the data to measure clinical effectiveness. This will go a long way to improving a data culture and likely will impact positively on colleagues and patient satisfaction.
On a final note in this exciting journey, we are looking to create a data warehouse that allows data from quality and clinical outcomes to be available with other business data from HR and Finance. This will allow us to ask questions about what is the most efficient and effective care to maximise outcomes and patient satisfaction at Priory.
ENDS
Contact: [email protected]
About Priory and MEDIAN
Priory is the UK’s leading independent provider of mental health services. We treat more than 70 conditions including depression, anxiety, addictions, and eating disorders, as well as children’s mental health, across our nationwide network of sites. We also support autistic adults and adults with a learning disability, Prader-Willi Syndrome and brain injuries, as well as older people, within our specialist residential care and supported living facilities– helping as many people as possible to live their lives.
Priory is part of the MEDIAN Group, one of Europe’s leading providers of high-quality mental health and rehabilitation services. The MEDIAN Group comprises: 290 facilities with 5,000 beds caring for 28,000 people in the United Kingdom, 120 facilities with 20,000 beds caring for around 250,000 patients in Germany, and 15 facilities with 2,000 beds caring for 13,000 people in Spain, with more than 29,000 employees overall.