iQ HealthMaps

Mapping the health needs of local communities to deliver the right services, in the right place, at the right time.

If PBC is to deliver effective improvements in quality of care for patients and value for money, it will require an integrated approach by PCTs, PBC clusters and Hospital Trusts, especially with the prospect of cuts to funding allocations ahead.

Resources must be deployed more discerningly as blanket solutions neither make financial sense nor tackle health inequalities. Instead, targeted approaches focused on very specific population groups are what is needed. However, this requires robust evidence of a local population's long-term needs in order to design and deliver the right services, in the right place, at the right time.

Most PCTs, as local commissioning leaders, are increasingly analytical and expert organisations and are supporting their PBC groups with information they need for the development of plans and business cases for service redesign. However, PCTs still face a number of fundamental problems. Most lack sufficient analytical resources to cope with the demand for information required by PBC groups and in turn, being able to validate submitted plans within the required timescales.

Fig1. Comparing all teenage pregnancies versus abortive outcomes data extracted from clinical systems, segmented by socio-demographic profile type.

Also, despite the overwhelming amount of data available, nearly all of it is based on the experience patients have of secondary care. Not only does this SUS data contain significant errors (which are likely to increase with the new HRG4 coding), but it is just the tip of the illness iceberg. In order to design services that keep people healthier for longer and reduce inequalities (as well as demand for secondary care and thus help alleviate significant overspends in PCT allocations), commissioners need primary care data from GP's clinical systems, where 90% of patient contact with the NHS is recorded.

In addition, effective commissioning needs to look beyond NHS data to get a total picture of need - non-health data such as deprivation, crime levels, educational attainment, ethnicity, housing quality and local facilities are all important proxy indicators of health.

By combining all these information needs with interactive mapping, iQ HealthMaps ® is the only solution that allows visualisation of what cannot normally be seen - a complete picture of the health, needs, behaviours of and influences on local communities, at both a micro and macro level.

iQ HealthMaps ® empowers all parties involved in the commissioning cycle with the evidence required to deliver continuous improvements in quality of care for local patients by targeting resources precisely where they are needed.

If you have any queries about the product, or if you would like to arrange a no obligation demonstration to see the product and discuss the associated issues, please do not hesitate to contact us