Web-based assessment tools

DiabetesE

DiabetesE, developed by Innove, is an online, diabetes service, self assessment tool. It was designed as a cost effective alternative to peer review, to measure and benchmark the quality of diabetes services and drive continuous quality improvement in diabetes care. It is one of a suite of complementary information tools which operate under the auspices of the National Diabetes Information Service (NDIS) and, since 2003, it has been provided in England by BT, through a contact with NHS Connecting for Health.

Using a built in scoring and decision support system, DiabetesE enables primary and secondary care providers and commissioners to:

Quickly and easily conduct a baseline review of diabetes services
Instantly benchmark the quality of services against others
Identify service strengths and priority areas for improvement
Access current evidence and best practice to identify ways in which improvements can be made
Develop improvement plans reflecting the goals and aspirations of national policy and guidance
Continually re-assess, benchmark and review progress in improving diabetes services

In 2009, Innove Solutions was commissioned to re-write the software to:

Refresh the interface
Make the system more flexible
Update core algorithms in the tool
Support the introduction of assessment tools for other health conditions / services. For example, we recently piloted the NHS Diabetes Foot Care Audit inside the DiabetesE system. The pilot was successful and has now been fully integrated into the tool.
Display third party data e.g. National Diabetes Audit, Quality and Outcomes Framework

In 2010, Innove Solutions was commissioned to introduce new functionality into the tool, to support the Government’s aspiration to deliver transparency in health outcomes and, to accommodate the introduction of new commissioning organisations. The high level DiabetesE results are publicly available: https://www.diabetese.net/Public/HowDoICompareOptions.aspx

In 2011/12, to make DiabetesE more efficient, scalable and easier to maintain, Innove Solutions is developing DiabetesE as a Model-View-Controller (MVC) application, utilising the latest Microsoft .Net technology.

In addition, Innove Solutions provides the national DiabetesE technical helpdesk support.

Burden of Disease

The Burden of Disease methodology was developed by researchers at Harvard University and the World Health Organisation for the World Bank, to quantify the amount of premature mortality and disability present in any given population. The summary measure that the methodology derived was the Disability Adjusted Life Year or DALY.

The methodology allows the use of DALYs to carry out projections of:

Future burden
Risk factor analysis
Cost-effectiveness analysis for specific interventions

Burden of Disease is an important tool that can be used to help the planning of future health service provision in a specific area.

To make the methodology more accessible to commissioners, Innove Solutions has developed a database system that can quickly and automatically carry out this analysis, for any given population and, generate the output as a combination of graphs and tables. Once calculated, this data can then be exported in a standard Excel format, for further manipulation.