Interactions individuals have with care services over time

This chart illustrates the contacts made with health and social care services by 50 individuals over a three year period. It represents a new way of visualising data from the Nuffield Trust and demonstrates the frequency with which patients with chronic diseases use different services.

Four of the patients (shaded in blue) had high risk scores according to the combined predictive model Combined Predictive Model. This high score means that they were predicted to be at risk of having an unplanned hospital admission in the next 12 months. The remaining 46 patients (shaded in white) had low risk scores on the combined predictive model, and were therefore predicted to be at low risk of hospitalisation.

By linking together a range of health and social care data (in a way that protects individuals’ identities), we were able to track all the contacts that these 50 individuals had with primary care, secondary care, and social care over a three year period. Each element of the health and social care system is represented by a red disc.

At the start all 50 patients are at their usual place of residence (illustrated as the grey rectangle at the centre of the chart). As the animation progresses, these patients can be seen to move back and forth between different parts of the health and social care system. Each time a patient has some contact with a services,  the size of its red disc grows. In addition, the chart keeps a tally of the number of visits, which are recorded separately for the low risk (white) patients, and for high risk (blue) patients.

This chart illustrates the relative use of different services and how some individuals use services much more often than others, which underlines the importance of risk adjustment in evaluation.

For further information about our work in this area visit the Impact of telehealth and telecare: evaluation of the Whole System Demonstrator project page, and the Examining the effectiveness of virtual wards project page.