Ascribe users told to ‘plan do, review’

"Plan, do, review" and spend more time looking at healthcare outcomes, Ascribe’s executive chairman advises users of his company’s systems.

“We have got to do things that work and stop doing things that don’t work,” Stephen Critchlow said when addressing the Ascribe User Group annual conference in Birmingham.

“I believe that there are things every person in this room can do, definitely, to ensure that people have longer and healthier lives.”

Critchlow conceded that advances had been made in stopping unproven or actively dangerous treatments, but pointed out that the 2009 review of the NHS in England and Wales recorded that 3,500 people died because of mistakes made as patients were handed over from one care setting to another. In the same year, 850,000 patients suffered some sort of error in their care.

He showed how retrospective data analysis can provide valuable insights into clinical issues and help to focus resources in areas where they could be most effective.

On video, a team from Leeds demonstrated a system for extracting key words about street drugs from free text in medical records and relating those words to post codes. Links to particular post codes emerged which could be used to see where community services need to concentrate their efforts, they said.

Critchlow added that sometimes inappropriate treatments are given for the best reasons.

“Everybody in healthcare is compassionate. Doing nothing isn’t seen as compassionate. But we don’t have the systems to capture the outcomes,” he said.

Marketing by drug and dressing suppliers also contributes to the pressure on clinical staff to prescribe treatments even when clinical trials done on products are not statistically powerful enough to show that what they were doing is beneficial.

The consequences of failing to focus on outcomes are serious, he predicted. The NHS is consuming 9% of UK GDP and rising.

“Simply, we won’t be able to provide healthcare as we do today,” said Critchlow.

Clinical services and solutions provider, Ascribe, was recently acquired by EMIS, the UK’s leading primary care system supplier and executives from both companies were at the meeting.

Critchlow said that work with Ascribe’s Clinical Engagement Network had looked at systems integration in secondary care, but showed that what is really needed is integration between primary and secondary care.