Commissioners to see pathways

A new tool for analysing NHS Pathways data will be available to commissioners next February.

The NHS Pathways Intelligent Data Tool has two strands; the Continuous Quality Improvement dashboard, and the Directory of Services Analysis dashboard.

NHS Pathways senior information analyst Paul McIntosh tool EHI the tool is in beta testing with people from NHS England and clinical commissioning groups.

They are providing weekly updates, which are helping to refine the tool before its launch next year.

NHS Pathways and its integrated directory of services is the underpinning technology for all NHS 111 services and 52% of 999 calls. Each month, around half a million calls are triaged through Pathways and its integrated directory of services.

The CQI dashboard allows commissioners to performance manage every call made using Pathways.

It provides a detailed breakdown of each call that has been triaged through NHS Pathways including average call length per site and per user, and the percentage of calls directed to different services.

McIntosh said this means commissioners can look at individual call handlers that are, for example, sending a high number of ambulances, to see if they are “over-triaging” patients. Each site using NHS Pathways gets one free CQI licence per site.

The DOS dashboard is designed to provide commissioners with key information on service usage, demand and supply and is available on a three-year licence, which will cost around £1,000.

It can be split geographically, allowing commissioners to benchmark themselves against other areas of the country.

It provides them with ‘gap data’; so they can see when a service was not available to a patient and for what reason, such as opening hours or capacity.

This includes a summary of ‘catch all’ data, which is situations where A&E had to act as a ‘catch all’ where no other services were available.

“Of most interest to commissioners is why are these services not offered?” said McIntosh.

He added that commissioners can trial ‘phantom services’ to see how they would affect the system before actually deploying them.

NHS England sponsors NHS Pathways, which is delivered by the Health and Social Care Information Centre.