dn:Director Solution areas: Single View of Patient, Regulatory Compliance, Business Improvement

• Protecting patients and improving care through an effective Single View of Patient
• Prevent inaccuracies, inconsistencies and missing data within patient records from compromising patient care
• Ensure correct formatting of health service ID number to minimise anomalies
• Increase consistency of data entry across GP practices, Data Warehouses, web entry and coding teams

• Ensure accurate reporting of care episodes
• Ensure accurate reimbursement for every episode of patient care with fit-for-purpose HRG coding data reporting – right treatment, right location, right patient, right authority, resolving discrepancies between commissioner and provider
• Improve tariffing performance through reduced over- or under-coding
• Identify anomalies through improved data matching
• Improve budget planning and forecasting through analysis of fit-for-purpose care data
• Avoid CQUIN punitive deductions through accurate, fit-for-purpose coding

• Deploy effective data governance for improved service delivery
• Ensure fit-for-purpose consolidation of data from multiple source systems/silos through dn:Director’s powerful matching, parsing, cleansing and deduplication
• Prevent poor quality data from entering the NPfIT data spine

How big is the problem?

A recent Audit Commission PbR Assurance Report analysed the accuracy of clinical coding within a sample of Acute Trusts within the UK. The Report indicated that the average HRG error across a sample of trusts was 9.4% with results per Trust ranging from 0.3% to a staggering 52% of all HRG coding being erroneous.

The Report notes that this also generates a consequential knock-on impact in other calculations, including activity planning, commissioning, resource allocation and clinical audits.

The results are no small issue: ensuring fit-for-purpose data fo accurate clinical coding throughout the commissioning process is therefore essential for both Acute/Hospital Trusts and Primary Care Trusts.

The UK Department of Health’s Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) payment framework makes a proportion of providers’ income conditional on quality and innovation – including accuracy of data provision by care providers. This thereby permits the PCT to punitively incentivise the care providers to ensure clinical coding accuracy by withholding up to 0.5% of total revenues. This level of withholding could easily equate to £500k for some Hospital Trusts, which could be enough to place whole areas of care at risk.

dn:Director for Healthcare

Ensuring fit-for-purpose clinical coding data is obviously a huge priority across the Health Service. From one simple, central application console, Datanomic’s dn:Director software helps organisations to discover the problems in data and take action to correct them; across all databases, regardless of supplier.

To assess your current data with you, Datanomic would be delighted to facilitate a free 90-minute QuickStats Workshop. Using a sample of your data with the dn:Director profiling and auditing processes, this workshop helps assess potential errors, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in data sets and provides suggestions for ways to fix them to ensure your data is fit for purpose. At the end of the session, we will leave you with a detailed Results Book of findings.

To request a QuickStats Workshop for your organisation, please follow this link to our QuickStats Workshop Request form.