Value_and_Improvement_in_Financial_Services___King_s_Health_Partners

Finalists

  • King’s Health Partners - winner
  • North East Lincolnshire Clinical Commissioning Group
  • Northern Devon Healthcare Trust

King’s Health Partners: Value based healthcare

The judges said this was a great example of value-based pathways with excellent patient involvement.

King’s Health Partners (KHP) has set out to unite financial and quality information in value-based reporting.

Working with clinical teams in three pilot specialties - hepatitis, endocarditis and stroke - it restructured cost information to represent hospital pathways, rather than departmental boundaries, and created a suite of patient-focused outcome measures to best represent quality from patients’ points of view.

Before this project, consideration of finance data was largely the preserve of managers; clinicians mistrusted financial data and, often, the motives of those presenting it. KHP worked with multidisciplinary teams through workshops to analyse activity-based costings from the individual patient level up - revealing to clinicians the level of detail backing up headline costings.

Building multidimensional outcome measures alongside costings meant clinicians were provided with a rounded picture of the service - not just asking them to cut costs. Clinical teams deployed discussion groups, evidence reviews and surveys to identify the outcomes that mattered most to patients. Fifty patients and carers attended discussion groups; over 100 completed surveys were returned. These conversations changed the trust’s minds about what mattered: for instance, highlighting the importance of anxiety related to the possibility of recurrences after endocarditis. The trust aimed to measure the outcomes that mattered most, not just what was easy.

Eighteen months into a two and a half year Health Foundation-funded project, KHP had created new patient-led outcomes and pathway cost measures in King’s College Hospital’s stroke, hepatitis and endocarditis services.

In addition, the organisation had developed value dashboards that bring clinicians and managers together.

Judges said KHP had united clinicians and non-clinical staff with a joint vision. They also noted the project was realistic and scalable.

Finalists

  • North East Lincolnshire Clinical Commissioning Group: Paediatric Assessment Unit in A&E    
  • Northern Devon Healthcare Trust: Development of local community currencies and modelling to underpin delivery of change in the community