Scottish and Irish data ... and that's it.

The data for Scotland and Northern Ireland was released last Monday and is now on the site. It has been a little more awkward uploading the data this year due to the changes in the areas and the appearance of areas without prevalences (palliative care) and depression having two different prevalences. I hope this makes some sense when viewing the data but nothing is set in stone and bright ideas welcome!

Wales also released some data this week but this did not go down to practice level and is therefore not particularly useful for many purposes. The statistical release was described as release one so there may be more although the site also suggests that there will not be an update for a further year. I am enquiring about further data.

Even more oddly is the English data. The Information Centre has spreadsheets of data at national, SHA and PCT level but not practice level. Practice level data is available but only one practice at a time through their own web interface. I have emailed them asking about spreadsheets but have not year heard back. In fairness they were probably quite busy on Friday.

I will keep you informed about their replies.

New Business Rules (v10)

There is presumably some schedule behind the production of new business rules for QOF. These are the rules that govern the data extraction from practice systems and are negotiated across all four countries. For this reason they tend to be a bit of a camel.They pop up every six months or so, and the version numbers seem to increase by 0.5 each time. Counter intuitively it is the ones ending in .5 that are the big ones but with version ten of the business rules being recently released what is new?

Well not a lot. This has its downsides. Mental health is still a bit of a mess with its Hotel California register (once you are on it you can never leave). For the most part this will be something of a relief to practices who don't fancy changing all of their codes again.

There are a few changes worth noting. Firstly smoking exception codes have disappeared, but only for Records 22. The exception codes (for informed dissent and unsuitability) are still there for high risk groups counted in the smoking indicators.

Also in relation to smoking patients under 20 with asthma are no longer in the high risk group. I don't know why, especially as patients of that age with diabetes, heart disease or strokes are still in there, but there you go.

More important changes have been made to dementia assessment. There is now a specific code for annual review ( 6AB ) and the old, vaguer, codes no longer count.

In a similar vein the old LVD exception codes no longer apply (those starting 9h1 ) and have been superseded with 9hH codes.

My suggested action plan for practices would be

• Check the review codes for dementia (especially on templates) since April and make sure they are 6AB
• Check the exception codes for heart failure (templates again) and make sure you are using 9hH codes

Happy coding!

Osteoporosis and Crystal Balls

Waiting, waiting. We are waiting for this years data but just around the corner is also the report from the review group as to what they would like to see in next year's QOF.

Well a rather heavy hint has arrived in the form of Evaluation of standards of care for osteoporosis and falls in primary care commissioned by the Information Centre from the Kings Fund. (it was published co-incidentally with the National Library for Health's Osteoporosis & Fragility Fractures National Knowledge Week which I seem to have missed).

The King's Fund document is a very thorough review of current information in practice systems about osteoporosis (basically not a lot) and the possibilities of generating some useful QOF targets. It seems to be possible. It is however a relentlessly practical document - for which its authors deserve a lot of credit. It is acknowledged that it is very difficult to work out differences in coding from differences in practice. New codes and a proper definition of treatment are required. The huge (and probably undefinable) strain on investigative resources in secondary care are also highlighted. One final conclusion stands out as understanding the problems with QOF.

A preferred set of codes would need to be agreed and disseminated to GPs at least three months before implementation.

You would not normally think that you needed to point out that design needs to come before implementation, but in the wake of last year's mental health mess apparently you do.

Only one problem remains - what goes out for this to come in? No word yet and very little time if it is to be implemented properly next year.

2006/7 Data Publication Dates

I do get asked quite a bit when the new data is due to come onto the site. Well all the data comes from the various departments of health in the four countries. The current plans from England and Scotland are to release the data sometime in September. Something of a relief for me, at least, as I have to get all of the new data into the database.

As an aside the English GP patient survey 2007 has been released. As this is down to practice level and is in a reasonably friendly format I will try to put this onto the site in addition. It also includes interesting figures such as rurality (really horrible word!) and deprivation factors. For largely presentation reasons however this is unlikely to precede the full QOF data (it will be linked from the 2006/7 QOF data).

Gaming, and report writing

A few weeks ago the Centre for Health Economics at York University produced a report looking at some of the statistics in QOF. It looks in some detail at both disease prevalence and to some degree at exception reporting. They are particularly interested in the difference in behaviour between high scoring practice and lower scoring ones, although they also look at social and societal differences between practices.

They only looked at Scottish practices due to the rather better data that was available for them, which has got to be a pat on the back for ISD Scotland.

I won't go into detail about the mechanics of the analysis - you can read it yourself although I would warn you that some knowledge of statistics is needed. It is not a light read. health economics papers rarely are. Most of the really interesting findings are related to the differences between 2005 and 2006 in practices that did, and did not, get maximum points in a given area.

The results are interesting. In general terms those practices who hit the top indicator thresholds in the first year increased their prevalences in the second year relative to those practices which did not. Conversely those practices who did not reach the top thresholds tended to increase the amount of exception reporting they did.

Now there is probably nothing too surprising in that. It would be a rather worrying situation for an incentive scheme not to lead to changes in behaviour in the direction of the incentive. That is exactly what is happening here. Practices are tending to most work in the areas that lead to the greatest incentive. There are certainly issues with the underdiagnosis of chronic diseases and there are probably many people who could be exception reported and are not.

The report talks a lot about "gaming". It does not define this however and I struggle to find a good definition on the Internet. Perhaps the most benign definition would be, in this context "undertaking actions to increase revenue that would not improve patient care". Actually this would encompass all exception reporting. This is not a bad definition as they define altruism as precisely the converse (personally I think that is professionalism but lets not get bogged down in semantics)

The authors of the report do not look so kindly on gaming. They define it thus:

However, exception reporting also gives GPs the opportunity to exclude patients who should in fact be treated in order to achieve higher financial rewards. This is inappropriate use of exception reporting or "gaming".

You can see where we are going here, can't you? By page 15 they are just calling it cheating.

That is not to say that I disagree with their mathematical analysis. I actually think it is rather brilliant and represents an attempt to model QOF mathematically in a way that has not been seen before - in public at least.

However they fall over in the conclusions. They cannot see any reason for these variations except cheating and dishonesty. Now that is one possible explanation for their findings but it is not the only one by any means. They seem to have very little idea of how exceptions are actually used. They don't see practices a living organisations with priorities. If you incentivise them to look for more patients they will find them - there certainly seem to be plenty undiagnosed with diabetes and hypertension. If they are going to get extra cash for a more efficient exception reporting system then they are likely to do that. It could simply be an indication of priorities.

None of this needs dishonest exception reporting or fraudulent diagnosis, simply an understanding of where the statics come from. So are GPs cheating lying scoundrels? We some might be but there is no solid evidence of this on a large scale. It is reassuring (as a GP) to read their first conclusion.

The fact that practices could have treated substantially fewer patients (12.5%) without falling below the upper thresholds for indicators and thereby reducing practice revenue is compatible with altruistic motivation.

Not so bad after all!

Encouraging news from Leaminton Spa

Readers outside the Leamington Spa area may not have seen this article in the local paper giving the rather good news that more practices than last year had gained maximum points (1000 this year, 1050 last year.

This is a little surprising as there are certainly more targets to reach this year. If this were repeated across the country it would certainly be a major achievement for practices.

Full details will be released by the NHS in September. Last years details are on this site. In the meantime congratulations to practices in Warwickshire.

QOF reduces admissions - or does it?

I like to be positive here. It is nice to find positive things about the QOF. I was very interested to see reports that higher QOF scores in asthma were associated to a reduction in emergency asthma admissions. Good news - or was it?

The original report (1.7M pdf) was produced by Asthma UK. The report, to be fair, is a glossy affair putting a political message rather than a scientific paper. There are virtually no figures, although some, partially processed, have been put in a couple of appendices. There are some graphs but even these do not seem to support some of the conclusions given.

There is undoubtedly a great variation in the number of emergency admissions with asthma. The greatest factor appears to be latitude with the number going up as you go north and pages six and seven make this clear. So far, so good. There is then a brief pause for a full page photograph of a nurse clinging to a bag and mask and a name and shame list for PCTs. The high admitters tend to be city PCTs and the lower admitters leafy southern PCTs, a fact not commented on. The next page is titled "Why the Divide?". It starts with the sentence The difference in hospital admissions across England is unlikely to reflect differences in the number of people with asthma.. Asthma UK appears to be saying, without offering any real justification that the number of people admitted with asthma is unrelated to the number of people with asthma. Intuitively it seems incredible and unfortunately no evidence if given to back up this bold statement. In fact it is printed above a graph showing pretty much the opposite.

Lastly we get to the correlation with QOF points. There certainly seems to be a weak correlation between QOF score and asthma admissions in 2004/6 - the first year of QOF. This may be something of an underestimate as they use QOF score rather than total QOF achievement. Why should that make a difference? Well QOF scores are capped at 70%. Any extra achievement above this is not counted. In 2004/5 over a third of practices got every single point in the asthma section of QOF. The extra achievement of these practices has been thrown away in the analysis.

In any event all that we can say is there is a correlation. Cause and effect is impossible to suggest without at least some data from previous years.

I would love to see some data that QOF is making a difference. I was disappointed that this report shows little other than a large variation in asthma admission around the country. It does not answer the questions of why half as well as proper peer reviewed study (no mention of QOF though!).