Birmingham ‘OwnHealth’ project begins

Up to 2000 patients with long term conditions are to be enrolled in a telephone-based care management system from this week as part of a programme funded jointly by the NHS and a pharmaceutical company.

Birmingham OwnHealth, an ‘assertive care management programme’, was launched in Eastern Birmingham East and Birmingham North PCTs this week and will aim to recruit 2,000 patients in four electoral wards with diabetes, coronary heart disease, heart failure or high risk of cardiovascular disease.

The programme’s aim is to provide telephone support to patients with long term conditions, in the hope that it might ultimately reduce hospital admission rates and deliver improvements in morbidity. It is funded by Birmingham and the Black Country Strategic Health Authority together with NHS Direct and UK Pfizer Health Solutions, a subsidiary of the US-based pharmaceutical company.

The initiative, modelled on a system that been running in Florida for five years, offers enrolled patients a programme of telephone-based consultations with one of 12 ‘care managers’ who will be nurses employed by NHS Direct. The care managers will call individuals at pre-arranged times, as often as is needed for each person, to provide advice, help and encouragement or to prompt them on specific aspects of their treatment programme. Care managers will use Pfizer’s disease management software.

When patients are recruited to the programme they will be given an initial assessment of their needs and be helped to develop their own care plan covering issues such as stopping smoking or checking their cholesterol.

The two PCTs, which hope to merge as part of the NHS reorganisation, have signed up to run the programme for 18 months although there will be an interim evaluation will take place at the end of September to assess the project’s impact clinically and financially as well as the impact on patient satisfaction.

Andrew Donald, Director of policy and redesign for North and Eastern Birmingham PCTs said the initiative was a ground-breaking partnership. He added: “It is a practical example of how NHS bodies can work with private organisations with the right expertise to provide flexible new services tailored to individual lifestyles and circumstances, and delivering personalised care.”

The Birmigham PCTs plan a full evaluation of the programme covering issues such as patient engagement and satisfaction, clinician engagement and satisfaction, measures of changes in patient health seeking behaviour, clinical parameters of improved disease control, use of health services including emergency admissions and accident and emergency attendance as well as financial parameters.

The Birmingham project follows on from a similar project run by Pfizer with Haringey PCT, called TeamHealth which finished in November last year. That recruited 600 patients with coronary heart disease, heart failure and diabetes as well as running a control group of 150 patients. A spokesperson for Pfizer told EHI Primary Care that results of the evaluation would be available in late spring.

A spokesperson for Haringey PCT said all partners were pleased with the implementation of the TeamHealth project to date but no decision had been taken about whether the project would be restarted.

She told EHI Primary Care “TeamHealth was a pilot programme to further understand the potential role and benefits of care management within the NHS and demonstrate how this can be delivered in the UK. Ahead of the results of the evaluation it would be premature to speculate on any decisions regarding the future of such a service in Haringey TPCT.”

The US project that Pfizer Health Solutions has been running for five years, Florida: A Healthy State, covered nearly 150,000 patients and results included a lowering of blood glucose levels in 50% of patients with diabetes and a 45% increase in the number of patients with asthma reporting no symptoms.

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Birmingham PCTs sign up for Pfizer self-care project