Distilling the data

6/24/2016 9:58:00 AM | Tomorrow's Medicine

The article is contributed/written by

Every year, SingHealth institutions handle more than 4 million patient visits. The data holds the potential to be harnessed to create effective care interventions.

Professor Julian Thumboo and Professor David Matchar, co-directors of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Health Services Research Institute (HSRI), are keen to promote the analysis of patients’ healthcare usage patterns in the SingHealth Regional Health System (RHS).

Prof Thumboo explained the potential: “Health services research allows us to come up with evidence-based solutions to improve healthcare delivery for chronic diseases. For example, our colleagues are working in areas such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

"Some of the data we look at includes clinical indicators, attendance figures and patient demographics. This allows us to determine trends so that current standards of care, treatment protocol and clinical outcomes can be improved.”

Having access to useful data can help healthcare providers implement timely interventions. For example, a 2015 SGH study of 5,862 patients found that factors like age, number of surgical procedures, white cell count, serum albumin, and number of emergency department visits in previous six months were significantly associated with 30-day readmission risk.

"Health services research allows us to come up with evidence-based solutions to improve healthcare delivery."

– Prof Julian Thumboo, Co-Director, SingHealth Duke-NUS Health Services Research Institute

The findings have helped clinicians identify at risk patients early, and introduce appropriate interventions to reduce readmission risk.

“Some patients who lack social support or who have complex medical conditions often turn to the Emergency Department for help when their condition becomes more severe. This is not ideal. With health services research, we hope to gain insights on how to help them before they reach that stage,” Prof Thumboo shared.

Population segmentation is a key part of health services research. It categorises the healthcare needs and utilisation of different segments of the local population - an area that is underresearched locally and regionally.

Prof Matchar’s team is currently working with the A&E departments, polyclinics, geriatrics clinics, and inpatient medical service in the SingHealth RHS to develop and validate a quick tool to identify health and health-related social service needs.

Patients are assigned to needs “segments” – groupings that correspond to typical packages of service needs to alleviate undesirable outcomes such as avoidable hospitalisation.

The tool, referred to as the Simple Segmentation Tool (SST), can be used to triage patients to receive more detailed clinical and social service evaluations. Ultimately, an electronic version is planned, which will provide valuable, real-time information for the SingHealth RHS to efficiently serve the needs of its population.