Awards

Comments on the winning nomination:

‘From my perspective I believe BI are the highest performing and most supportive service in the Trust.  You and your team deliver all of our asks on time and the information will be well-presented, user friendly and easily interpreted.  Your team are visible and fully integrated into our services and are an invaluable service and immense support.’  Senior Operational Director, USC.

‘Just reading through the Quality & Performance Report – it keeps on getting better!  Thank you for all of your leadership and support in developing this really important performance insight tool – can’t thank you enough.’  Director feedback.

Read the full report in the October magazine.

Some of Elaine’s great work:

Elaine has developed a Primary Care reporting system, based within R, that has transformed the way the Somerset CCG Primary Care team utilise insight within their roles. Historically, the data has been wrangled within Excel and presented as several plots within a PowerPoint pack. The new pack, which is hosted within a HTML file, is flexible and much easier to distribute across Primary Care Networks and GP practice stakeholders. It has met with a great reception by those who are using it, and further development is currently underway.

Elaine has led the way in our own organisation in adopting R as a new tool for analysts to utilise and has been instrumental in working with directors to include coding as a fundamental skill to help develop analysts in the future.

Some of Sygal’s great work:

Sygal has distinguished herself as an analytically focused quality-improvement professional, delivering analytical work with a depth and breadth that has had a major role in initiating and driving change, and supporting improvement work on a large scale.

Her insightful work, which often challenges entrenched practice, achieves traction due to its thoroughness, honesty and clarity, and her ability to tell data stories, draw conclusions and make recommendations in a manner accessible to stakeholders ranging from clinicians to senior management to front line and support staff.

Her analytical work has helped transform several services, including a major project on portering and patient movement that has won a commendation from the Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Healthcare Data Analytics: “The judging panel were impressed at this use of analytics in a novel setting to improve outcomes in their portering team, bringing about clear benefits for patients and also efficiency savings. ”

Read an interview in the September Magazine.

Shortlisted:
Business Intelligence, Imperial College Health Partners
Digital Research Environment Team, Great Ormond Street Hospital

The judges said – “Overall the team have shown at national level value of better informatics.”

Chief Analytical Officer Marc Farr of East Kent Hospitals NHS, digital lead for Shared Health Analytics for the Kent and Medway STP, Thomas Lovegrove Information Lead for the Trust and their virtual team of Analysts were nominated for the AphA “Team of the Year” Award. Marc has worked previously in management consultancies and academia at UCL, currently developing a method for measuring analytical maturity in the public sector with the Health Foundation.

The judges said – “Attempt to use AI methods on risk prediction and range of other work that shows benefits of better analytics.”

The nomination is for the team’s analytical diligence and cross-disciplinary excellence in evidence-driven innovation. The Team demonstrates remarkable NHS data scientific analytic ability in their approach to quantifying the impact of our proactive health coaching intervention in East Kent.

Along with Marc the team Trust comprises:

• Thomas Lovegrove – Strategic Development Manager – Information Lead, Strategy Department. Studied Clinical Psychology at University, about to start his final year part-time Health Data Science MSc from UCL.

• Bartlomiej Arendarczyk – Information Analyst Cambridge graduate in Natural Sciences.

• Tim Jones – Principal Information Analyst for Strategic Development.

• Lisa Barclay – Head of Local Care, Ashford CCG.

The nomination relates particularly to the team’s application of complex multi-state models for the estimation of transition intensities between different Urgent and Emergency states and how these intensities are affected by covariates. The team adopted a semi-Markov approach for data modelling, basing their analysis on a total of 568 patients on the Health Navigator controlled intervention. They deploy Hazard Ratio analysis and visualize results using impressive incremental cost-effectiveness planes, working in R.

The team focused on evidencing the cost effectiveness of the intervention and impact on urgent and emergency care consumption. They demonstrate a statistically significant impact of the coaching intervention even on patient mortality, and an up to £24k per patient per year saving in hospital costs including an extensive analysis of tariffs and Quality Adjusted Life Years.

The entire project is based on openness and transparency, bringing together private, acute and commissioner organisations, sharing information and creating a transparent and scientific methodology to come to a joint view on the efficacy of a service.

Shortlisted:
Chris Nugent, Public Health Agency,
Northern Ireland
Sarah Lea-Weston, NHS Devon CCG

The nomination cited Lori as an invaluable member of the Department of Psychological Medicine since September 2017. The department is part of the NHS and receives circa 6,000 referrals per year for assessment and treatment of complex psychiatric presentations in a large NHS general hospital. Lori was em-ployed in order to improve the department’s quality of provided care.
Lori in fact achieved several objectives well beyond this basic one. Lori improved patient care and the effectiveness of NHS mental health services in wider Nottingham.

While not entirely representative of her multifaceted contribution, the project Lori was nominated for involved the evaluation of clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a novel psychiatric service model that was developed over the last two years. The model involved the deployment of our hospital-based liaison psychiatry team into primary care, to care for people with medically unexplained symptoms and complex physical-mental co-morbidity.

Lori innovated on several levels by applying analytics to tackle complex clinical questions. She did this by involving the whole spectrum of involved professionals from primary to tertiary care, from clinical staff to managers and from administrators to policy makers.

As a result, Lori’s scope was pragmatic and clinically relevant, but also armed by superb analytical skills. Her solutions led to the development and subsequent improvement of our new service.
The service demonstrated excellent clinical effectiveness and financial effectiveness, and has produced a fully replicable model. In fact, the results were so good that the project is about to receive a seven-figure investment for replication to the rest of Nottingham, and was rated by the BMJ awards as one of the top-6 mental health projects in the UK.
Furthermore, the impact of the project is now nationwide, with the Centre for Mental Health about to publish a report on it, recommending its dissemination.

Lori’s contribution and dedication was crucial in all the above excellent achievements.

The judges said:”Sensible attempts to make the most of Proms information. Mature approach to analysis using statistical methods. Wide range analyses undertaken and direct links to service improvement. Lori is a stand-out performer in a quality list.”

Adam provides analytical support to a wide variety of improvement programmes, including Acute Deterioration, Mental Health and Learning Disabilities, Obstetrics Cymru, Frequent Attenders at Emergency Departments & the Nurse Staffing Programme.
The nomination cited: Adam is so special – he has a wonderful blend of problem solving, ideas generation, programming, analytical skills and an ability to communicate to audiences large and small, technically-minded or clinically focused.

His calm and unthreatening manner endears so many and he is able to quickly build rapport with so many different people from so many different backgrounds and levels of seniority.

He is extremely focused on delivering high quality, relevant output and is always prepared to articulate the uncomfortable messages in the belief that transparency will encourage progress. This authenticity often lends credibility to that message and in turn, his advice is heeded.

The team have worked with operational nursing staff, finance and administration to develop a report that will helps save significant admin and nursing time, facilitating the effective management of a comprehensive waiting list.

Members of the team participate in a fortnightly Technical Working Group (TWG) that is chaired by a senior nurse and has members from the operational team, data quality, finance and business intelligence. The reports, including any new ones being developed, are brought to TWG to ensure all disciplines are aware of the key operational information and can help shape new reports to ensure they are of maximum value.

The nomination for the Devon Partnership Trust Informatics team highlighted that the team ‘provides excellent support to a multitude of services within the Trust and beyond, providing intelligence to the clinicians and managers to improve quality and delivery of care. It has managed to keep a high reputation despite staffing pressures and as well as constantly challenging demands from new services. This has been achieved with no drop in service standards and with a good team spirit and humour’.