Healthcare Commissioning Forum

The key priority amongst the commissioning intentions for Prescribed Specialised Services for 2015/16 is collaboration in order to achieve the most efficient service models through delivering change. In other words, the challenge to identify the most efficient service models and deliver change may be best tackled in partnership between CCGs and Specialised Services.

But how should services and initiatives be prioritised and what is the impact of existing services and initiatives on specialist care? National initiatives such as Early Diagnosis, Care at Home, CfV, QIPP, etc. are delivering the NHS agenda to reduce hospital attendances and admissions and to constrain levels of spend to match available resources. The difficulty has always been the identification of the most promising initiatives for a specific locality, their successful delivery and the reduction of costs whilst improving outcomes.

Identifying correctly the most suitable initiatives based on real activity, case-mix and clinical parameters takes away the guesswork most commissioners are facing which often results in the non-delivery and uncertainty of QIPP. By utilising advanced algorithms that identify initiatives with the highest impact based on actual activity, commissioners now have a tool that provides certainty. The i5 Commissioning Opportunities (COP) report enable commissioners to focus on initiatives that deliver the highest impact based on clinical conditions of the local population. It creates cohorts of patients, which would benefit from a previously successfully implemented initiative within the NHS, to enable commissioners to find suitable initiatives from a catalogue of hundreds.

The upcoming Co-Commissioning arrangements between CCGs and NHS England will, for the first time since the restructuring, enable CCGs to implement Out-of-Hospital strategies that affect specialist and non-specialist patients. By focusing, though COP, on initiatives that can deliver healthcare services for patient groups, commissioners of specialist services and CCGs can achieve a reduction in healthcare costs that leads to a delivery of QIPP savings.