Informatics
Introduction
Health Informatics is the internationally recognised and Department of Health term covering the use of resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine.
The number of Emergency Department attendances has been increasing rapidly over the last few years, which has focussed attention on why this has occurred.
There are several aspects to the CEM Informatics group’s work:
- What information should be collected in Emergency Departments? [See CEM Minimum Dataset]
- How should diagnostic information be collected [See CEM Unified Diagnostic Dataset]
- How should information be collected in Emergency Departments?
- How should information from Emergency Departments be shared?
- How should information be used to remunerate Emergency Departments? How can remuneration of Emergency Departments improve patient care, and what information is required for this? [See Casemix - how your ED is paid]
News
Mar 2013 - Confirmation of the arrangements for Payment by Results (PbR) in 2013-14 is now available on the DH website at: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-of-health/series/payment-by-results-2013-14
Dec 2012 - latest versions of UDDA and Minimum dataset published
July 2012
HPA asks emergency medicine doctors for early warning of Olympic public health threats - The College and the Health Protection Agency (HPA) are asking emergency medicine doctors to report potential links between patients and the Olympics or Paralympics when reporting notifiable diseases, chemical exposures and other threats to public health between July and September 2012. This enables control measures to be implemented as early as possible, which it is hoped will prevent illness spoiling anyone’s enjoyment of the Games and avert serious harm to health.
See here for full details of how to report
June 2012
Best Practice Tariff for Same Day Emergency Care - Please take a few minutes to complete a short survey about ambulatory emergency care. We need to gather stakeholder's views to inform the Department of Health’s review of the Same Day Emergency Care Best Practice Tariffs (SDEC BPTs) introduced in 2012-13. Please complete the questionnaire by following this link. We would be grateful if you could complete the questionnaire by 3 July 2012 latest: http://www.snapsurveys.com/swh/surveylogin.asp?k=133967868234
April 2012
Emergency Department Syndromic Surveillance System - Find out more about this CEM/HPA project and the benefits it can bring to your ED
March 2012
PbR 2012-13 arrangements published - The final 2012-13 Payments by Results package has been published by the Department of Health in England. This comes into effect from 1st April 2012. There are five Emergency care tariffs for services delivered in EDs and minor injury units (MIUs), spread over 11 HRG classifications based on investigation and treatment. In addition, best practice tariffs have been introduced for a number of emergency clinical scenarios. See Casemix - how your ED is paid for a summary and link to full details
September 2011
Summary Care Record - visit this page for a summary of progress on the introduction of summary care records and their impact on Emergency Departments in England.
June 2011
The Data Vacuum in Emergency Care (British Journal of Healthcare Management 2011 Vol 17 No 1 http://www.bjhcm.co.uk/) - Download a recent article written by members of the CEM Informatics group that describes the current situation with respect to PbR, assesses the problems that currently
exist and describes an initiative by the College of Emergency Medicine to improve data collection and accuracy to inform commissioners and clinicians of the clinical activity that is occurring within Emergency Departments.
Latest version of Unified Diagnostic DAtaset (UDDA) published (16th June 2011).
May 2011
Agreement has been reached between CEM, Connecting for Health and the Department of Health Information Centre about the form of future information collection in Emergency Departments.
In future diagnostic data will be collected either in
- ICD10 form using the CEM Unified Diagnostic DAtaset (UDDA) OR
- SNOMED form and then reduced to ICD10 form using UDDA
In future, treatment and investigation data will be collected in OPCS format rather than CDS format.