NICE Quality Standards – front of mind with BI Professionals?

...NICE Quality what?! Over the next 5 years, NICE plans to produce up to 150 “Quality Standards”.  These are intended to be a cornerstone of the new NHS Outcomes Framework, which sets out aims and objectives towards improving outcomes in the NHS and what this will mean for patients and healthcare professionals.  

Although not mandatory, the overriding goal of these NICE Quality Standards is to outline what “high quality health and social care looks like” in order to “create a comprehensive library of standards for all main pathways of care” - in summary, an information tool for patients/the public, clinical and other health and social care professionals, provider orginisations and Commissioners.

March was a significant month for the development of these standards with the publication of a whole tranche in Depression in Adults, Diabetes in Adults, Glaucoma and Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD).  This announcement follows the earlier Quality Standards in Stroke, Dementia, VTE and Specialist neo-natal care, launched in 2010.

Many others are currently in development and will be published during 2011 – these include standards in COPD (Imminent), Alcohol Dependence and Chronic Heart Failure (June 2011), Breast Cancer (August 2011), followed by End of Life care (November 2011). 

So what do these Quality Standards actually mean for Pharma?  Do we need to do anything around these new developments? Well here are a few ideas and pointers to think about…

Have you considered how you need to adopt your strategies to help customers to achieve the standards outlined in the Quality Standards documents?  

For example, are there implications for patient education programmes?   Could your organisation do more to support with information provision about the quality of care which patients can now expect to receive within a particular care pathway?  If so, what type of support would most be of value?

Also, could your brand team do more to use its best endeavours to reinforce what “quality really looks like” to healthcare professionals within your therapy area? If so, what would be the optimum way to do this?

Furthermore, have you considered those activities which your company could undertake to support NHS benchmarking of performance against evidence-based measures of best practice to identify opportunities for improvement? What support would be of most value and why?

These are just a few examples of the reasons why we believe that healthcare business intelligence professionals need to have the Quality Standards fully on their radar – and be thinking about potential opportunities created by the publication of the standards together with appropriate areas of investigation.

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NICE Quality Standards…..what’s the latest situation?

For more information on the NICE Quality Standards, click on the link below:

http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qualitystandards/qualitystandards.jsp