Population Health Management

What is Population Health Management?

This work is aimed at improving the health of an entire population.

It is about improving the physical and mental health outcomes and wellbeing of people and making sure that access to services is fair and equal. It helps to reduce the occurrence of ill-health and looks at all the wider factors that affect health and care.

The project requires health and social care organisations to work together with communities and partner agencies. The organisations will share de-identified information (where information about you has been removed) with each other in order to get a view of health and services for the population in a particular area.

In the Lincolnshire region a population health management programme has been introduced. The programme will combine this de-identified information from GP practices, community service providers, hospitals and other health and care providers to allow a comprehensive picture of health and care needs to be identified and services planned according to need.

How Will my Personal Data be Used?

The information needed for this Programme will include information about your health and social care.  Information about you and your care will be used in the programme, but in a format that does not directly identify you which we refer to within this privacy notice as pseudonymised.

The information will be used for a number of health and social care related activities such as.

• improving the quality and standards of care provided
• research into the development of new treatments
• preventing illness and diseases
• monitoring safety
• planning services

Who Will My Personal Data Be Shared With?

Your GP will send the information they hold on their systems to the NHS Arden and GEM Commissioning Support Unit, who are part of NHS England.   NHS Digital who already holds information about other health and care attendances, will send the information they hold to NHS Arden and GEM Commissioning Support Unit.

They will link all the information (which does not directly identify you) together in order to review and make decisions about the whole population or patients that might need support.

The coded data about you will also be sent to another company called Optum.  Optum have been commissioned by NHS England to provide specialist analysis of the data.

Both the Commissioning Support Unit and Optum are required to protect your information and maintain confidentiality at all times, so the practice have agreed to  Arden and GEM Commissioning Support Unit providing a pseudonymised non confidential monthly extracts of data to the programme  This will also entail Arden and GEM CSU providing a one off pseudonymised non confidential data to Optum on patient consultations and clinical coding so that an analysis of activity and outcomes can be completed.

As information included in this PHM programme from the practice will only ever be used in a de-identified form, current opt-outs will not apply as these only relate to the use of confidential patient information for purposes outside the individual’s direct care.

The practice will be the only ones to be able to re-identify their own patients in order to offer interventions that have been identified as being beneficial to them through the data analysis carried out.

Is Using My Information in This Way Lawful?

Health Care Providers are permitted by data protection law to use information where it is “necessary for medical purposes”. This includes caring for you directly as well as management of health services more generally.

Some of the work that happens at a national level with your information is required by other parts of the law. For more information, speak to our Data Protection Officer.

Sharing and using your information in this way helps to provide better health and care for you, your family and future generations. Confidential patient information about your health and care is only used where allowed by law and in the majority of cases, anonymised data is used so that you cannot be identified.

What will Happen to My Information When the Project is Finished?

For the NHS England and Improvement/Optum programme, data will be processed only for the duration of the 20-week programme.  Once the 20-week programme has completed the information will be securely destroyed from Optum systems.

AGEM CSU working on behalf of the practice  will retain the practice data as agreed for a maximum of 14 days to ensure that they successfully remove any identifiable data once this is accomplished the identifiable practice data will be securely destroyed. The remaining de-identified data will be used by analysts to provide health and social care statistics for PHM projects for the length of each project as agreed with the practice.

Patient Objections – Opt-out