Using shared care records to identify opportunities for personalised medicine could prevent hundreds of heart attacks and strokes annually and save the NHS millions of pounds, according to shared care firm Graphnet.
Health Innovation Manchester has used the Greater Manchester Care Record, which was developed using Graphnet’s shared care technology, to identify 18,904 people across 170 practices in Greater Manchester eligible for receiving novel therapies to help reduce their cholesterol.
This approach to personalised medicine – which combined novel therapies with standard statin treatment and lifestyle changes – helped to prevent 80 heart attacks and strokes over five years saving the NHS £2 million in direct costs.
If this approach was applied across the UK’s population, it could potentially prevent more than 370 heart attacks and strokes every year, saving the NHS more than £9 million annually, said Graphnet.
‘Focus now’ on shared care
Graphnet director, David Grigsby said SCRs should be “the focus now” to help GPs and NHS trusts find those in need of specialised medication and provide “care tailored to people’s personal needs and circumstances.”
He said: “The emphasis in health and care, particularly since Covid-19, has been on taking preventative, proactive, data-led action – rather than being the ambulance at the bottom of the hill.
“Shared care records contain the insights that are needed to achieve that mission. It is an important development in providing care tailored to people’s personal needs and circumstances across all health and care partners.
“Shared care records will become more valuable as more information from different sources is included, and more care professionals are able to access it.
“Creating, rolling out and recording the results from a greater range of care plans will also play a crucial part. That needs to be the focus now.”
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Looking at patients holistically
In a separate project in Wirral, a service was launched to use the Graphnet shared care approach to provide a personalised prehabilitation approach to diabetes as opposed to a traditional clinical model.
One Wirral CIC worked with Graphnet to analyse the waiting lists at Wirral’s Arrowe Park Hospital and identify diabetes patients that were most at risk of having surgery postponed.
Those patients identified were contacted within 48 hours for an appointment with a diabetes prehabilitation health coach. They would then have their haemoglobin A1C (HbA1c) test to measure the average blood sugar level over the past two to three months.
If the results were over 69mmols (an ideal HbA1c level is below 48mmols), they were booked in for an appointment with a diabetes specialist nurse, who looked at medicines management and optimisation as well as personal health.
The service helped reduce HbA1c levels in the 178 patients referred to the service from 73.469mmols to 63.2569mmols in just 12 weeks. They also saw a reduction in BMI from 34.2 to 32.99.
Lucy Holmes, Wellbeing Lead at One Wirral CIC said: “The population health and data-driven approach means we are able to contact the right people at the right time and give them the best intervention before their procedure.
“It means we’re looking at a person from a holistic point of view, not just clinically and not just non-clinically.”
“One enormous step forward has been the digitisation of care plans, including for long-term conditions like diabetes and end of life care,” said Grigsby. “These are held and shared on care records, enabling professionals involved in a patient’s care to see their preferences, important medical notes and agreed approaches.
“Progress is being made. However, we have only just started to scratch the surface.”
