September 12, 2014
A new app for doctors could help them improve patient outcomes and ease the budgets of NHS England hospitals by predicting the risk of readmissions.
Since 2011, over £390 million has been withheld from English hospital budgets under a policy that penalises the hospital if a person is readmitted within 30 days.
But with the new app it will take doctors less than two minutes to predict a risk of readmission that may be avoided if an intervention is deployed accordingly, potentially saving their hospital thousands of pounds as well as improving patient outcomes.
The app – PARR30 Community Edition – which is being made available through Aridhia’s Community Programme, calculates risk through a predictive mathematical model developed by the Nuffield Trust using an anonymised 10% sample of all NHS England hospital admissions between April 2008 and 2009.
Easy to use in real-time and by the bedside, the app processes 17 pieces of information that can be obtained from hospital information systems or from the patient’s notes. These include their date of birth (to calculate age), detail on recent admissions, and diagnosis of any major health conditions (these include eleven major health conditions drawn from the Charlson co-morbidity index).
The app is powered by Aridhia’s platform, AnalytiXagility, a platform that provides services focussed on improving service delivery and patient outcomes for chronic disease management through analytical workspaces, accelerating multi-institution collaboration for translational medicine, and wealth creation through shared IP and royalty models, so everyone benefits.
Through its community programme, Aridhia is committed to translating research into clinical practice and want to engage healthcare in the transformational journey to become a predictive and wellness service. PARR-30, the first of their community edition apps deliver at point of care analytics to support informatics innovation into the NHS.
PARR30 is Aridhia’s first release as part of its new Translational service, which enables the rapid, bespoke build of data applications for clinical and research use. Data collection apps, risk stratification apps, and clinical trial selection apps can all be built in a matter of weeks, and interact with Aridhia’s analytical workspace environment, AnalytiXagility.
David Sibbald, CEO of Aridhia, says: “PARR30 is a brilliant example of how anonymised data can be put to use in a practical way to improve the outcomes of patients across the NHS and is the first App launched in our analytical workspaces.”
Aridhia is inviting NHS Trusts that are interested, to register their details and become a key partner in the translation of research into clinical practice. In addition, Aridhia is also offering a Trust Edition, a paid for service that allows trusts to localise the scoring algorithm, using additional data to calibrate and personalise PARR-30 to a specific hospital.
Since 2011, hospitals in England have been paid for initial treatment but they are not paid again if a patient is brought back in with a related, avoidable problem. Hospitals have responsibility for looking after the health and wellbeing of patients for up to a month after they are discharged.
The scheme was introduced by the then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley in response to the negative impact of another initiative where hospitals were incentivised to cut lengths of stay, causing an increase in the number of emergency readmissions.
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