With so many pressures on delivering care in out-of-hospital settings, it often feels like as long as a package of care is agreed and funded, then the case, so to speak, is closed. On to the next person in the queue…
And yet this does nothing, really, for the person who needs care – apart from ticking a box. Across so many systems, there are inconsistent, incomplete records, not just of what an individual needs but what care they received. That, ultimately, can have dramatic consequences for that individual, the provider of the care, and the funder.
At Alocura, we believe the foundation of better care is better data and better systems. That’s why we’ve built our end-to-end care management platform Rostrata around the individual’s NHS number. This unique identifier enables us to create clean, unified records that can perform for individuals as well as funding bodies.
Why incomplete data is so dangerous
Not having full oversight into an individual’s needs – and the care delivered – is more than a technical problem. It affects the entire ecosystem of a care package. When records are duplicated, missing, or outdated, the result is confusion.
Look at it like this. Without an NHS number anchored to the care plan management system, as Rostrata offers, there’s no way of understanding the medical history and needs of the individual in the first place. And if you can’t understand what an individual needs, how are you then going to track whether the care delivered is correct? How do you even know whether the care plan is being followed?
The potential for inefficiency is clear, but it can also be a safeguarding issue too if these discrepancies aren’t spotted. But without the data, you’re going to struggle to spot them until it’s too late.
The NHS number, then, is the ideal anchor because it is this unique identifier for everyone using NHS services, providing a consistent reference point across GP practices, hospitals and community care providers. And yet, somehow, it’s not being used in the very systems that manage the delivery of that care.
That’s why we made the NHS number such a key feature of Rostrata. It gives everyone clarity, continuity and confidence that they can rely on the accuracy of the data gathered to ensure good outcomes.
Clean data like this allows us to cut through the noise and bring together what is currently a fragmented picture into one coherent narrative about an individual’s care journey. It’s the definitive link between the disparate datasets that care providers and funders may – or may not – have.
Why Rostrata’s clean data approach works.
By embedding data quality into our end-to-end care management platform – using the NHS number as the cornerstone – we know that everyone in the process has the right information at any time about the performance of a care packages. This improves safety for the individual as much as anything else; with the clinical records in the same place as the data for a personal assistance’s shift patterns, Rostrata immediately flags missing shifts or incorrect competency levels.
This leads to faster decision-making too; because there are huge reductions in the time reconciling data, if a care package clearly needs more funding (or even less), that can be actioned immediately, rather than waiting for a paper-based audit in 12 months.
It’s effectively a chance for analytics to have a real impact on the entire healthcare system in out-of-hospital settings. And it’s only available with Rostrata. Data might not be the most obvious word to use in care – but it’s going to be crucial if funders and providers are to navigate the future. With Rostrata, we’re preparing for this future by making sure healthcare starts with trustable, structured, individual-level data.