U.K. foundation highlights four projects that use data to improve patient care

The U.K.'s Health Foundation highlighted four projects that are evaluating new approaches to using data for quality improvement. These are:

1. Segmenting within general practice: personalizing care for patient subgroups - A general practice identified that more personalized care for the most frequent users of GP services could improve both the quality and sustainability of the care they receive, as well as reducing the number of GP appointments needed by these patients. Interventions including:
   1. Tagging the medical records of frequent users to ensure they're seen consistently by one doctor or a small team of clinicians;
   2. Training staff in using non-medical approaches where clinical avenues have been explored and excluded; and
   3. Improving data coding and regular data analysis to identify new frequent users;
2. Innovative presentation of data to improve service user safety, reduce suicides and inform clinical caseload management - To reduce the number of suicides and improve patient safety, the project combines national data on suicide/premature mortality risk factors, with locally collected data on service users' circumstances;
3. Addressing non-clinical risk in people with long-term conditions and multi-morbidity to improve health outcome - The project will use data analysis to understand the associations between long-term health conditions and social and economic factors; and
4. A quality registry approach to support patient-centred, outcomes-focused, cost-effective care in rheumatology - The project will focus on improving quality of care for rheumatology patients, and increasing self-management. It will pilot a quality registry in Scotland to allow patients to log their own symptoms via an online tool.