Background

Greater Manchester was the first region in England to adopt an integrated care system (ICS), allowing the region’s NHS and Care team to make decisions tailored to the needs of its 2.95m population, rather than following national NHS policies alone.

When founded, the ICS wanted data to play a crucial role in helping Greater Manchester leaders design and deliver integrated NHS and social care services.

A data insight and intelligence department was created to help the organisation access data, process it safely, and make it available as information and insight; so decision-makers could target resources effectively, predict demand, and improve patient outcomes. This would help strategy, population health, operations and finance.

Challenge

As teams across the ICS frequently required data the organisation’s didn’t yet have, an essential part of developing an analytics and data science capability was finding a solution to safely and inclusively capture data to feed into analysis.

Initially, to gather system data, a spreadsheet is circulated, and responses are collated. But this was time-consuming, and data was always slightly out of date.

Plus, as data requirements and priorities regularly changed, requests for new data gathering could easily overwhelm the team’s capacity.

Solution

The insight team looked to identify a data capture solution that would work for the whole organisation’s needs, be it for patient self-reporting, through to situational awareness.

They considered creating their own.NET forms, but this would be time consuming. They also looked at general form builders, but they did not include the specific NHS data, system and security requirements.

The team then identified Aire Forms from Aire Innovate as a good solution for its demanding data capture needs. The platform enables electronic forms to be built, using simple drag and drop functionality, to customise exactly to a project’s needs. This enables bespoke forms to be created quickly.

The team especially liked that forms produced don’t require a login, yet the data is secure. So, a link to the form can be shared, and people can access it from anywhere.

The open platform is also interoperable with all systems and so is ideal for an ICS with hundreds of IT systems.

Finally, the system can be set to automatically send an email or message to prompt people to complete the form, when and how often is needed. This would be important to ensure form completions.

Results

The organisation ran a pilot of Aire Forms in Salford Royal NHS Trust, asking staff wellbeing questions, which went well. This test was timely, as Covid hit shortly after, which enabled the technology to support the ICS’s emergency response planning. 

The team built bespoke forms using Aire Forms to gather data as part of its situational reporting dashboard and reports. Every GP practice, dentist, pharmacy and hospital in the region was asked to complete their form to inform the ICS and Government on their pressure scores, ability to operate, PPE levels, and what stock they were low on.

The team put in place a system to ensure that at two touch points during the day it would be 100% up to date. Also, if anything changed, people could go into their area, update the information at any time and the report would also reflect this update.

After Covid pressures settled down, the requirement to understand how the system is coping through pressures remained, especially as Winter hits, the ICS requires system level reporting.

More recently, using Aire Forms, Manchester ICS was well placed to be able to quickly set-up the gathering of specified data to feed into the National System Control Centre initiative, which is looking to gain a national picture of Winter pressures in 2024/25. As part of this, decision makers can access a digital Greater Manchester operations dashboard, displaying a live data feed of crucial operational data.

Impact

The ICS now uses Aire Forms for ‘a million and one data capture use cases’, from situational reporting on maternity wards, to mortuary capacity across the Northwest. Its currently developing a data capture approach for safeguarding and medicine optimisation.

Commenting on the impact Aire Forms has made, Graham Beales, Deputy Director of Data and Analytics, Greater Manchester ICS said “Aire Forms is a core tool within informatics. With it, we are confident in rapidly solving any data capture request, be it a whole system or a single question. It’s a flexible tool that integrates into our way of working.”