BOBI Award Highlights Importance of Quantitative Research

Anyone involved in the analysis of health data knows the importance of telling the story – finding insights that can be easily consumed and, hopefully, support real change.

As part of its drive to promote innovative and effective use of Business Intelligence within the healthcare industry, the BHBIA’s Best of Business Intelligence (BOBI) Awards recognise excellence across the healthcare business intelligence spectrum. The Analyst of the Year award, sponsored by Cegedim Health Data, was won by Genevieve Hall, Director at Insight DoJo, for her analysis of the prescription of opioid analgesics across CCGs in England.

Genevieve Hall comments, “A lot of market research in the healthcare space is qualitatively focused and I think it is really positive that the BHBIA’s award encouraged quantitative analytics. There is a real proliferation of real-world health data and it is important for the industry to develop the skills and people who can work with that data and create meaningful and actionable insight.

Analyst of the Year

Using NHS England data, Genevieve’s analysis focused on the growing global concern regarding the over-use of opioid analgesics, particularly in the treatment of chronic pain. As her submission confirmed, “Opioid overuse can lead to negative patient outcomes, both in terms of potential addiction and side effects, and economical burden on the health care system – while there is also little evidence to support the efficacy for long term pain.”

Genevieve created an interactive report that revealed how the level of opioid prescription varies across the 191 CCGs in England and provided initial recommendations as to how to start tackling the issue.

She explains, “I spent a lot of time thinking through the best way to identify and understand the problem areas. There was a lot of complex data manipulation and analysis in the background, but the goal was to avoid getting bogged down in the detail and provide a usable, overall indication of the prescribing situation in different CCG groups.”

By focusing on two dimensions - the level of analgesic prescriptions in general and the portion of this accounted for by opioids – Genevieve was able to create four CCG segments, each of which requires a different action, including highlighting one segment that could provide a best practice example:

  • Urgent action required: 34% of CCGs have a high analgesic case load with high opioid prescription rates.
  • Monitor for future risk: 19% of CCGs have a low analgesic case load with high opioid prescription rates.
  • Maintain: 30% of CCGs have a low analgesic case load and lower opioid prescription rates.
  • Maintain and use as example: 16% high analgesic case load with low opioid prescription rates.

Based on this analysis, specific behaviour change objectives were recommended for each group.

Actionable Insight

Analysis of The Health Improvement Network (THIN®), a Cegedim database, continually reveals the value of anonymised real world data. From highlighting trends in prescribing to identifying comorbidities and providing insight into diagnostic challenges within certain disease areas, access to anonymised longitudinal patient records for approximately 6% of the UK population is providing analysts with the chance to discover and present insights in ways that can be easily consumed across the health community.

The importance of delivering accessible information was highlighted by the BOBI awards judges. Who commented, “This entry demonstrated a good story flow, with the PowerPoint presentation leading the user through the process. They clearly understood the brief, used appropriate segmentation based on logical cuts of the available data, and provided a clear output, which explained each segment in detail. There were a variety of strong recommendations for action, including addressing issues and additional analysis.”

Genevieve concludes, “With the volume of high quality, real world health data plus the advent of more advanced techniques such as machine learning algorithms, it is important as an industry that we know not just how to analyse data but also to synthesize and communicate it in a simple way that provides a clear indication of what is going on – and what actions could be taken.”

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