2012/13 QOF Data now on the site

All of the QOF data for 2012/13 is now on the main website and will be available for download in a few days. Due to the timings of it being published this year and the time I had available the data for all four countries is going on at the same time.

There are a few small changes this year. Firstly there were new smoking indicators which now applied to all patients who had reached their fifteenth birthday. As there is both an indicator showing how many people were asked, and a second indicator about giving advice to people who said that they smoked we can used the numerator of the first and the denominator of the second to give an idea of the proportion of patients who smoke. This is a little limited as it only applies to patients who were asked but may be useful or at least interesting. This appears at SMO PREV ALL in the numbers. It is entirely a pseudo indicator made up by myself.

I had an interesting email during the year about the prevalence figures on the site. In several disease areas, such as diabetes, osteoporosis or rheumatoid arthritis the register is restricted according to the age of patients. For instance diabetes is 17 or over and nobody goes on the osteoporosis register until they are fifty years old. At the moment the denominator on the site is the whole practice list, rather than just those patients who could possibly qualify for the register. This would tend to underestimate the prevalence in the qualifying population.

There are two sides to this. Using the adjusted denominator makes it easier to compare populations. It is a more realistic measure of disease prevalence although in many cases the actual disease is relatively rare outside these age groups. The vast majority of diabetes, for instance, occurs in later life. Osteoporotic fracture is rare before 50.

There are snags though. Only England produces the adjusted figures and they are listed on the spreadsheets as estimates. It is also easier to see the relative disease burden on practices from the whole list figures. Comparison with earlier years is also easier.

My compromise is to keep the main prevalence figures the same but to include the adjusted figures for English practices. If you click through on diabetes you will see DM 32 Adj which has the same numerator but the adjusted denominator. Not so much a compromise as a fudge - I do both things!

Downloads should be available in a few days. As always the Access version is a bit painful to set up but I will try and push my increasingly aged laptop through it! General QOF stuff (and some stuff that comes to mind but absolutely no pictures of my lunch) please do follow me on twitter. You can see recent tweets to the right of this post.

The year 2013/14 will, for the first time have different indicators in each of the four contries. I have a year to figure out how to deal with this! In the meantime I hope to get a better API up and running. Also we should get some idea of what a new DES for admissions avoidance in England. It may be possible to model some of this from QOF data, but we await the details.