News

Yorkshire & Humber Care Record is making strong progress in advancing the population health management capability for the region to help better understand the needs of the people and improve the services provided.

It is another step closer to achieving the technology solution to enable secure data sharing to enhance information and intelligence needed to plan and deliver services to help improve care. This will help better meet the needs of people within a given group and area; reducing health inequalities and improving health and wellbeing with increased cost efficiency.

Yorkshire & Humber Care Record team is improving the way data is shared with safety and security as the key priority within the new technologies being implemented. The team is also advancing workforce skills by training staff from across the region at an academy, which will enable the benefits of population health management to be delivered within Yorkshire & Humber.

The academy is designed to:

1. Build awareness and a practical understanding of population health management delivery
2. Enhance the technical analytics capabilities of NHS Business Intelligence Analysts to enable them to deliver high-value predictive and prescriptive analytics
3. Strengthen leadership capabilities in the NHS and local authority workforce to enable effective collaboration and the building of strong inter-organisational and cross-capability networks across the region

The Academy will run from December 2019 through to April 2020 and is open to individuals from all NHS and local authority organisations within Yorkshire & Humber through an application process.

Monica Jones, Population Health Management lead for Yorkshire & Humber Care Record, said, “It’s exciting times for the Yorkshire & Humber region as we advance our technology so that we can improve the lives of people within our region because we have a better understanding of their needs.

“I wish to thank all involved for the speed of the implementation and I believe that providing an academy to the region will ensure that we all benefit from improved skills and understanding across the patch.”

The initiative is working at great pace by leveraging and utilising the abilities of a consortium of expertise supplied by Deloitte UK, Google Cloud and Synanetics, who were selected to work in partnership with the region following a robust procurement exercise earlier this year. Currently in its Alpha phase, the programme is continuing to work towards delivering a live production version of the solution in March 2020.

Dr Neville Young, Director of Enterprise and Innovation, at Yorkshire & Humber Academic Health Science Network, said: It’s good to see this work progressing at this pace and we welcome these latest developments.”

Yorkshire & Humber Care Record is one of five exemplars within NHS England’s Local Health and Care Record programme with an ambition for organisations to share data across the health and care system to help people get the right care at the right time in the right place, with safety and effectiveness.

Rob Webster, Chair of Yorkshire & Humber Digital Care Board; CEO for South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and CEO Lead for West Yorkshire & Harrogate Health and Care Partnership said, “Our region is committed to this programme of work because of the benefits created by understanding the needs of the people we work with. We are advancing our digital capability quickly which provides us with more information and improved intelligence to allow us to plan and deliver better services for improving health and care. I’m looking forward to hearing how people in our region benefit from this work in the coming weeks, months and years.”

Dr John Byrne, Senior Responsible Officer for the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record; Executive Medical Director at Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust added, “It’s massively important to continue our conversation with local people about the role data-sharing could play in improving health and wellbeing across the region; as much as it is to listen and learn from ideas and concerns people may have. This is why our next phase of Population Health Management work, as with previous phases, prioritises public engagement, with a new series of workshops and activities already underway.

“This research will help grow the connection and understanding between Yorkshire & Humber Care Record team members and local people, most of whom already are connected by virtue of calling this great region home. We’re not just talking about data-sharing, but how best to explain relative terms like security, privacy and indeed this thing we call population health management, alongside what communities think, want and feel about what this could mean for them.”

Further information on the Yorkshire & Humber Care Record is available on its website.