OBH are thrilled to announce the launch of the Population and Person Insight dashboard! #TeamOBH have been working in partnership with NHS England and NHS Improvement, and NHS Arden & GEM CSU on a data-driven approach to understanding and deriving meaningful insight into population health. The dashboard has been developed using national datasets – including secondary care, emergency care, community services and specialised services data – to group patients into segments based on common healthcare needs.

Understanding the population by cohorts of those with similar health and care needs is integral to a more person-focussed health system. Using the Bridges to Health segmentation dataset, this tool enables deeper insight into people who are healthy, people with long term conditions, people with disability, as well as those people who are nearer the end of life with cancer, organ failure, frailty and dementia.

The interactive tool contains a series of views so that users can easily explore and interrogate these population segments at a national, regional, system, CCG and PCN level.

With four years’ worth of data, users can also drill down into acute utilisation, cost and outcomes by segment to support service planning and redesign. Visualisations by age, ethnicity, deprivation and socio-demographic classification help to easily identify cohorts for further investigation and analysis.

In response to the current pandemic, a COVID-19 view was also developed with the aim of aiding NHS restoration and recovery programmes by helping systems to identify their vulnerable populations who have one or more ‘at risk’ conditions to inform decision-making around shielding and planning for the largest vaccination programme in the history of the NHS.

Sukhmeet Panesar, Deputy Director of Strategy and Development at NHS England and NHS Improvement said: “The NHS generates a huge amount of data which can be used to drive improvements in care and how services are run. By providing health and care systems with data which is grouped by population segments we can support NHS and local authority leaders to plan effective services and interventions based on meeting the healthcare needs, risks and priorities of their patients and citizens.”

Ayub Bhayat, Chief Data Officer at Arden & GEM said: “The population and person insight report acts as a diagnostic tool for every level of the system, enabling commissioners and providers to spot opportunities for further analysis and intervention. By providing a starting point for population health management approaches, we can then work with local areas to refine the model with their local intelligence and benchmark emerging opportunities.”

Dr Nasrin Hafezparast, Chief Clinical Data Officer at Outcomes Based Healthcare said: “The internationally-recognised Bridges to Health segmentation model provides a person-centred approach. By using this approach as the foundation for the new report we can categorise the entire population of 62 million people into eight segments, with 55 subsegment or condition registries on a monthly basis, over the past 4 years. It includes a first ever view of population-level healthy lifespan, or HEALTHSPAN®. The report also incorporates feedback from a wide range of groups including clinicians to ensure the data is meaningful.”

The report, which was launched on 15 February, is available to healthcare commissioners and providers within the NHS ViewPoint analytical application.

For more information about the report, and the wider population and person insight workstream, visit the dedicated FutureNHS workspace.