Dr Dennis Kehoe -
What is data?
Connected Health Cities made use of the wealth of data available in the NHS to improve clinical pathways for COPD, epilepsy and alcohol-related illness.
Patient data is sensitive and contains confidential information so a secure analytics platform was was required for researchers to store and analyse health data.
One of the safest, most efficient data analysis resources for researchers working with sensitive data, the TRE uses strict security controls to prevent unauthorised access and misuse of data.
CHC project partner AIMES, a commercial data centre based in Liverpool, built a TRE specifically for the North West Coast CHC which hosted anonymised hospital administrative data for the whole region.
This data was made securely and remotely accessible to a team of data scientists at the University of Liverpool who used statistical and geospatial analytical software to analyse data on our three clinical pathways.
Impacts
A new algorithm was developed to identify emergency admissions due to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). When compared with the national analysis, the NWC algorithm identified 45% more people with COPD currently being provided with NHS care
- An extra 25% of cases of alcohol-related liver disease were detected when compared with gold-standard review of clinical records resulting in improved monitoring of unplanned admissions and post-discharge events.
- The newly developed algorithms identified an extra 66% of epilepsy-related admissions when compared to just using the primary diagnosis code, now capturing more accurate average length of stay.
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