Change and Transformation in the Public Sector
Covid-19 challenged healthcare systems across the world and continues to do so, three years after it began. In England, Covid-19 created multiple new issues for the NHS to grapple with, including how to identify individuals at greatest risk, in order to prioritise emerging and limited treatment and care.
BJSS worked closely with the NHS to build a new platform that could identify citizens at scale and allow them to receive care throughout the pandemic and beyond. BJSS and NHS took a new approach to identifying patients; by integrating and analysing combined medical records in order to create and share cohorts of vulnerable patients.
This platform was first used to identify 1.7m Clinically Extremely Vulnerable individuals and ensure these people were protected from the worst of the pandemic through Shielding. It was then used to identify eligible patients and deliver them lifesaving treatments with more than 15,000 people benefitting from this potentially life-saving intervention.
The platform has evolved from a tactical response at the start of the pandemic to be developed into a strategic solution used to identify citizens across multiple health initiatives. This has created a new national platform, ‘Cohorting As A Service’.
Cohorting As A Service provides a re-usable, scalable and consistent platform for patient identification and improves the delivery of direct care for a range of illnesses, leaving the NHS with a transformational post-Covid legacy to support delivery of population health initiatives.
The impact the programme has had on vulnerable patients throughout the pandemic has been enormous. Since May 2020, the programme has delivered:
1.7 million people were identified as being Clinically Extremely Vulnerable and subsequently added to the Shielded Patient List and later prioritised for vaccination.
The identification platform generated over 1 million visits to the NHS Digital COVID-19 Risk Assessment web pages.
1.3 million PCR test kits were sent as provisions to an eligible cohort of patients.
Within the first 3 months of the launch of a new tool, more than 80,000 patients were assessed by clinicians across England for eligibility for newly approved Covid-19 treatments, contributing to more than 15,000 treatments.
The programme used its strategic capability to identify 650,000 people for Winter 2022 flu vaccinations who may otherwise have not been identified.
View the BJSS profile in the MCA Members Directory.