Individual health and social care event timeline

This chart shows all contacts that one individual person had with health and social care services over a three year period. These charts are an extremely powerful way to convey large amounts of information in meaningful ways.

Presenting such detailed information about a person this way might allow the person’s identity to be deduced, so to safeguard against this, we have introduced a degree of random error. In practice, this type of chart should only be constructed on demand and with the patient or service user’s explicit consent – and the chart should be destroyed automatically when the user logs off.

What the chart shows

Year 1: In the first year the patient had four outpatient attendances and three hospital admissions, as well as several GP visits. A social care assessment was carried out towards the end of the year but this did not result in any social care services being provided.

Year 2: In the second year, the patient had some more hospital contacts. Two social care assessments took place during this year, and a low-intensity package of home care was instigated.

Year 3: In the early part of the third year, the patient had an unplanned hospital admission. The provision of home care ceased and a further social care assessment was conducted. During the remainder of the year, the patient had another two unplanned hospital admissions, and a further social care assessment was conducted.

Why is this information useful?

The type of information illustrated on this chart will be most useful to clinical and professional staff (GPs, social workers, A&E doctors and hospital doctors). The chart summarises at one glance the full range of encounters that individual patients have had with a range of different health and social care services. At present, frontline staff are often unaware of what other services a patient has received. Presenting information in this new graphical way may help generate better coordinated care and a more seamless experience for patients and social care clients.

At a strategic level, understanding these patterns of health and social care use for different groups of patients has important implications for the planning and commissioning of services, and especially for identifying gaps in services.

Likewise, if we are to move towards a system where health and social care costs and benefits are potentially more explicitly interchangeable, then the ability to characterise patterns of service use in this way will become increasingly important.

This analysis forms part of the Nuffield Trust’s programme of work which is examining how data sets can be exploited to inform health policy. We are particularly interested in the how linkage between data sets can reveal a fuller picture of what is happening to people as they use services. For further information visit our Nuffield Trust Data Lab: exploiting existing information in new ways project page.