High-level summary
Over a number of years, Health Diagnostics have collaborated with Imperial College London’s (ICL’s) Department of Primary Care and Public Health on a number of independent outcome studies that have investigated various aspects of the NHS Health Check Programme.
Support provided
Health Diagnostics role has, and continues to be, as an industry partner on the research. In addition to providing NHS Health Check datasets to researchers for analysis (subject to local commissioner permissions), Health Diagnostics have also provided consultancy and advice on the nuances of implementing and operating local programmes. Julie Evason, Managing Director at Health Diagnostics, is listed a co-author on the publications that have resulted from the collaboration.
Outcomes
Paper published in BioMed Central
- One recent study entitled Evaluation of community provision of a preventive cardiovascular programme – the NHS Health Check in reaching the under-served groups by primary care in England: cross sectional observational study, was published in 2017
- The research shows that providers using Health Diagnostics’ IT solution are able to “effectively reach under-served groups by delivering preventive CVD services to younger, more deprived populations, and a representative proportion of ethnic minority groups”, thereby working to “reduce health inequalities” and address the inverse care law
Paper published in BMJ Open
- Another study entitled Development of a questionnaire to evaluate patients’ awareness of cardiovascular disease risk in England’s NHS Health Check preventive cardiovascular programme, was also published in 2017
- The study led to the successful development of a tool to be deployed by local authorities to assess increase the accuracy of attitudes and beliefs about their CVD risk (a crucial precursor to people taking effective action)
- According to researchers, “the resulting questionnaire, with satisfactory reliability and validity, may be used in assessing patients’ awareness of CVD risk among NHS Health Check attendees”
Views of researchers
- Researchers working on the evaluations have explicitly praised Health Diagnostics’ solution for its inherent ability to ensure complete datasets are collected by providers
- One of the aforementioned studies by Woringer et al highlighted the specific suitability of Health Options in this respect for gathering “routine Health Check data” in a “patient centred” manner
- In an interview with Maria Woringer – the lead researcher on the study – it was stated that data gathered with Health Diagnostics’ solution “had much better clinical and demographic recording of data [than that gathered using clinical system templates] because it was designed to collect data specifically for the health check. In addition, Health Diagnostics’ data underwent more routine checks than data that’s collected in general practice”