Final analysis of 12-month trial with Humber NHS Trust
By Lorenzo Gordon • 25th September 2017
The final data analysis for the 12-month Humber NHS Foundation Trust trial of My Health Guide with 200 service users, their families, NHS staff and 3rd-party care partners is complete. Before we get to the figures, a brief recap is in order.
Humber NHS Foundation Trust front-line staff spoke to people on their caseloads and between them agreed whether the individual would be included in the trial. The only criteria was that they had a learning disability. Using Humber Foundation Trust’s own data, Maldaba and Humber together looked at the first 60 of the 200 who were signed-up, in order to analyse the most amount of data from the 12 month trial. We established baseline data for those 60 people by annualising the person’s service utilisation at Humber Trust for the 6 months before they received My Health Guide.
During the 12 month trial we captured and were able to analyse 9 months of actual activity data for the 60 people. Again we have annualised this data to provide like-for-like comparison. To provide a picture of usual change we removed 5% ( 3 people) at each end of the spectrum of activity change. A breakdown of the comparison is shown in the table below.
Breakdown of change in service utilisation during My Health Guide’s 12-month trial at Humber NHS Foundation Trust:
| Face-to-Face | Out Patients | Phone | Other Services | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline | 3,052 | 618 | 1,588 | 3,524 | 8,782 |
| Trial | 2,383 | 537 | 1,205 | 2,005 | 6,131 |
| Difference | -669 | -81 | -383 | -1,519 | -2,651 |
| % Change | -22 | -13 | -24 | -43 | -30 |
The reduction of service utilisation by 30% is in-keeping with our interim findings during the trial, but remains striking.
Joanne Bone, Deputy Unit Manager, Humber NHS Foundation Trust commented that “We would love to see everybody that comes to us with this app. What we want to see is what people really think is important to them. We want them to have real empowerment over their lives.”
What does the data, and our experience with Humber NHS Foundation Trust tell us about My Health Guide so far? Well, firstly we can see that each category of activity (face to face, outpatient, phone and contact with therapies) shows a reduction in utilisation of the usual care delivery system from baseline to post implementation indicating that My Health Guide can support service delivery change provided across the different care formats.
The largest reduction is in therapy-based activity (-43%). This figure, coupled with our conversations with therapy clinicians seems to reflect a change in the delivery system used by therapy staff, relying on My Health Guide to deliver care in a new way. We are continuing to engage with therapy staff at Humber to understand why they in particular are seeing such benefit from My Health Guide, including what changes they have made to the nature of their engagement with their service users. We want to know whether there are changes in this area that can be transferred to other areas of care.
Finally, of the 90% of people whose data were analysed above, 30 of those 54 people saw an overall reduction in utilisation. We’ve always thought that My Heath Guide is not a perfect fit for everyone, and the data seems to confirm that whilst there are significant benefits to be gained from adoption of My Health Guide, selection criteria for people who will benefit from MHG is an important learning point. As we continue to work with Humber Trust in their scaling-up of My Health Guide usage we intend to examine these questions in more detail, to better understand precisely where My Health Guide adds the most value.
In the meantime we are celebrating these final figures: an overall reduction of service utilisation of 30% from our first trial.
Lorenzo Gordon, Director of Maldaba who produced and support My Health Guide added that “These figures exceed our expectations for the first 12 months use. We’re keen to continue our collaboration with Humber Trust and understand better how staff and service users can get the best out of this new approach”.
Service User Charlotte Slaney, when asked to rate My Health Guide, responded “Thumbs up!”.
