Dr Foster offers data on repeat admissions

 Medical data firm Dr Foster intelligence is offering PCTs a web-based tool that can identify patients and conditions with high admissions to hospital, allowing, says the company, better planning for future provision of services.

The High-impact User Manager (HUM), launched last month, is designed to calculate costs of the admissions and predicts risk of future occurrences per patient, using demographic and admissions data.

Professor Sir Brian Jarman, director of the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College, which developed the algorithms behind the system, explained how the system could benefit PCTs: "HUM allows PCTs and GPs to easily identify patients who have been high hospital users and to see how likely they are to be a high user in the future.

"The resource can help primary care providers to spot which conditions are particularly amenable to primary care intervention, which means people could be treated in the community without having to endure the stress of unnecessary hospitalisation."

Diane Gray, consultant in public health medicine at Milton Keynes PCT, which uses the software, said: "What we have show is that there are a group of people, especially older people with conditions such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and diabetes, who do go in and out of hospital far too often and that it is possible to be proactive about working with those people to help them stay healthy and at home."

She added that community matrons’ workload had been greatly decreased by the use of the software.

According to data collected by Dr Foster, COPD was by far the highest cause of emergency admissions in 2004-5.