GPs in England and Wales are benefitting from a new diabetes data site that enables them to see how their practices are performing against others by measuring diabetes treatment cost against outcomes.
Diabetes Practice Profiles (DPP) is a free web-based business intelligence tool that brings together a wide range of data on diabetes in adults into a single source. This includes data from the National Diabetes Audit, prescribing information from the Department of Health, and hospital care statistics from the Hospital Episodes Statistics NHS service.
According to Matt Cuff, MD of Switchstance, the Sheffield-based data and document management consultancy that designed the system, this marks the first time these sets of data have been drawn together.
DDP “provides benchmarking and commissioning support through a graphical interface and will combine activity and prescribing data for the first time within the same system,” he explained.
“The system provides the ability to drill down for detail and comparisons of resource versus outcome in scatter charts. So this could be used on all diabetic blood testing items against a diabetes-specific blood sugar measurement, or statins prescribed against good cholesterol levels.”
Dr Bob Young, clinical lead for the National Diabetes Audit and the National Diabetes Information Service (NDIS), which is hosting the tool, said: “At last, GPs can start to review and benchmark all their key diabetes data on one site.”
Launched in November 2012, DPP is available to all 60,000 GPs in England and Wales.
