Digital health technology is a key enabler for us to achieve a value-based approach to healthcare.
Value-based healthcare demands a data-informed approach to decision making at all levels, whether that is to support shared decision making in the consultation, for quality improvement in a service, for resource allocation or research.
One of the main datasets to capture is patient reported outcomes, commonly known as PROMs. These structured and often codified questionnaires are important status reports about the symptom burden and quality of life of an individual on a given day. They can be an important tool to support care and therefore must be embedded technically across our healthcare information system to be accessed by patients and their clinicians.
There are three important areas in-which the Welsh Value in Health Centre are working to improve the digital health of our healthcare system: data standards, data accessibility and data visualisation.
Our work is focussed on:
- Triangulating information – outcome, costing and process data together. This is so that we can understand what is happening in our system and find solutions to increase value for patients.
- Continuing to bring clinicians and analysts together to start answering some of the key questions affecting today’s NHS, so that we may become effective stewards of finite resources and improve outcomes at an individual and a population level. Leveraging good quality data. We are already addressing the digital and technical issues associated with the capture of patient reported outcomes in direct care.
- Making data available in clinical systems and be able to be extracted and linked to other data for analysis in support of service improvement. This detailed work requires partnership working between the Welsh Value in Health Centre and our key partners to ensure a seamless approach to tackling all of the relevant issues including data standards, semantic interoperability and information governance