East Midlands chooses McKesson InterQual

The NHS East Midlands Procurement and Commissioning Transformation has selected McKesson’s InterQual to provide evidence-based decision support to the region’s primary care trusts, acute trusts and community hospitals.

The collaborative commissioning support unit is a joint venture funded by nine PCTs with support from NHS East Midlands.

It is helping trusts across the region to decide whether they could use InterQual to identify a clinical evidence base for transforming services, in order to improve patient care and drive efficiency savings.

The roll-out is expected to support the region’s utilisation review programme, which aims to identify bottlenecks in the healthcare system and align and redesign services.

Peter Huskinson, director of commissioning services at EMPACT, said: “InterQual can be transferred and utilised across the whole care spectrum providing powerful information to the commissioners of today and the GP commissioners of the future.

“We aim to have a continuous workflow of patient-level data to support clinical decision making and ensure each care setting is appropriate to the individual patient.”

EMPACT has already started working with PCTs and acute trusts. Some of its early projects have to look at emergency admissions at Nottinghamshire and Lincoln, ambulatory care in Chesterfield and intermediate care at Derby.

Barbara Brady, a consultant in public health, who helped evaluate InterQual for EMPACT added: “Currently we don’t have enough data to understand, for example, how many acute admissions didn’t meet inpatient criteria.

“Access to this level of information through InterQual will help inform clinicians on the most appropriate care setting for the patient in question whether that’s emergency care, acute care, intermediate care or treatment at home.”

InterQual is already in use across Rotherham Health and Social Care Economy Partnership to help ensure that acute beds are being used appropriately and that patients are receiving appropriate support in the community following discharge.

Matthew Hunt, director of care management at Mckesson added: “The power of InterQual lies in its rich repository of world class clinical content.

“InterQual has been refined and proven over 30 years and benefits from a rigorous development cycle that is underpinned by systematic, critical assessment of the latest medical evidence and validated by an independent panel of 800 clinical experts.”

Link: McKesson UK