Partners in the Health and Care system for St Helens are committed to integration and this continues to progress at pace across the borough as St Helens Cares. The vision is to create high quality and sustainable health and care services for our residents.

This has included an innovative approach to business intelligence (BI) in St Helens and we committed to putting BI at the heart of the development of the local care system and recognise that effective data sharing and activity analysis is key to informing financial decision-making, and to removing duplication from the system to improve efficiency. 

The local care system has a large and complex information landscape and provides an opportunity to consolidate, connect and enrich the data held by partners to identify trends and patterns and gain insight. This intelligence allows organisations in St Helens Cares to anticipate population needs more effectively and target their interventions. 

St Helens Cares developed a BI hub that incorporates CCG, acute trust, public health and local authority BI teams who co-located at the end of last year.  The success of this way of working has been immeasurable but some notable achievement include: 

• Working together to develop a risk stratification for patients at risk of suicide combining data available in primary care, the acute trust and public health.
  
  
• Development of a performance dashboard for St Helens Cares that identified the key performance measures that tell St Helens Integrated Peoples Services management whether they are succeeding in their key priorities areas, or highlighting areas where performance needs improving, incorporating health, education, social care, and public health targets.
  
  
• Supporting the Integrated Director of Transformation to develop the St Helens Place Plan using data and intelligence supplied by the hub. 

• Development of performance reporting to support the establishment of a locality hub. The pack contained a wealth of information from smoking, obesity and crime rates through to achievement of QOF measures by practices within the area and hospital activity for residents.
  
  
• Better understanding population projections through public health data and working closely with the acute trust to understand the impact on the contract. We also worked much more closely on the information schedule in the contract to enable it to be an effective monitoring tool. This ensures that we invest the St Helens pound wisely and in the right way for our developing population.
  
  
• The team are working on ISD accreditation together and not as individual organisations and have started this journey. They are benefiting already from shared training initiatives and using wider skills of the teams to develop each other.