People are at the heart of transformation

The latest performance data on delayed transfers of care for older patients and waiting times highlights the impact of the increasing pressure on our health and social care system.

Yet while we need to draw attention to these problems, it can also create divisions and competition between organisations at a time when what is actually needed is greater collaboration.

All health and care organisations share the same ambition of delivering high quality services which are cost effective.

While there are many ways to do this, starting with an understanding of your unique local population is essential.

The new care models from vanguards are a great example of how local providers are designing very different and yet locally effective services.

We already have the technology to deliver to STPs clear visibility of their whole patient pathways within a six-week window of receiving their data

The new sustainability and transformation plan footprints build on this, although in some areas competing organisational performance priorities are hampering collaboration efforts, resulting in delays.

We work with multi-organisation teams to help build sustainable, analytical capability, giving them access to the information they need to instill confidence and clarity in the development of locally effective services.

We do this by integrating data generated from their population’s use of services in health, social care, housing, police, education, and wider. We then deliver this information in an easy to interrogate way.

By combining this data with workforce and outcomes information, systems can understand and monitor their response to the needs of their population and more easily identify the opportunities for improvement.

This places the use of individual data at an aggregated level at the centre of large scale transformation decisions.

All health and care organisations share the same ambition of delivering high quality services which are cost effective

We already have the technology to deliver to STPs clear visibility of their whole patient pathways within a six-week window of receiving their data. Derbyshire is a great example and their work on falls is the tip of the iceberg in terms of improvements in outcomes and cost benefits.

The same dataset can be used by multiple teams to analyse pathways, and deliver faster improvements and high quality evaluation.

We are excited to be working with organisations such as Essex County Council on even longer term sustainability as they harness advanced risk stratification and predictive modelling to improve the outcomes for children, building better life chances for the next generation.

Alison Foster is associate director at Pi Care and Health