Does QOF work?

There is quite a bit of publicity today for a paper in the BMJ asking whether hypertension targets have any effect on outcomes. Neither blood pressure or cardiovascular morbidity seem to have been affected.

It was with a sense of dread that found the paper. QOF has had more than its fair share of thinly disguised rants appearing as research. I was however very pleasantly surprised to find a well constructed piece of research with tightly defined methods and considerably clarity of thought. Maybe it takes researchers in the USA (Harvard to be exact) to look at these things objectively.

There is considerably debate about performance related pay and very variable evidence about how effective it is. There has been some research in the USA where schemes tend to make up a much smaller proportion of practice income than in the NHS.

It is of course disappointing although not particularly surprising to see a lack of observable effect. QOF is not, of course, a controlled intervention and it is possible to argue that we will never know what would have happened without it but this is pretty weak.

Now for the political bit. The cash for the QOF came, to a large extent, from a transfer from the old capitation payments. So the pay which previously went to practices and was used for treatment of hypertension was paid, in a different way, to practice for the same treatment of hypertension.

So little change but I am strangely cheerful that it has been demonstrated in such a high quality piece of research. More please.

Bringing QRISK to Facebook

This has nothing to do with QOF. Earlier this year the the good people at QResearch put the QRisk2 formula onto the internet with an open licence. This is freely available to download and use. This is quite something. There have always been problems with trying to apply JBS formulae as, for most people, the data to input is not there. Qrisk2 is based in large part on information that is easily available and the QResearch group provide formula that can estimate some of the other data.

I have put the formula onto Facebook with a fairly simple form. There is a limit to how simple it can be but hopefully it is at least usable.

The results are presented again as simply as seems reasonable. One of the things that can be done with the formula is some "what if" calculations. We can see the effects of stopping smoking or losing weight. There is even data drawn from NHS Choices which gives the closest NHS Smoking Cessation Clinics if you are in England, although this is not currently available due to a bug at NHS Choices.

The app is at http://apps.facebook.com/cvdrisk . Feel free to have a play around. You can change your data as often as you wish and see the effects. All your data is deleted when (or hopefully if) you remove the app from your Facebook account. Facebook will post that you are using the app but none of your data is posted back to Facebook unless you specifically type it in. You can post reviews or questions on the Facebook profile page.

Ooops

Many thanks to the reader who pointed out that, in England, I had transposed the two depression prevalence figures. I have now corrected this on the site. If you have downloaded the data there is now an updated version on the download page.

If you don't fancy downloading it all again you can switch in Access with some queries. I have not worked how to export these. If you are using MySQL the code is

update `achievement` set area='' WHERE `practiceid`regexp '^[ABCDEFGHIJKMLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]$' and area ='DEP Prev 1';
update `achievement` set area='Dep Prev 1' WHERE `practiceid`regexp '^[ABCDEFGHIJKMLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]$' and area ='DEP Prev 2';
update `achievement` set area='Dep Prev 2' WHERE area ='';
update `pcoach` set area='' WHERE `pco`regexp '5[A-Z][A-Z]' and area ='DEP Prev 1';
update `pcoach` set area='DEP PREV 1' WHERE `pco`regexp '5[A-Z][A-Z]' and area ='DEP Prev 2';
update `pcoach` set area='DEP PREV 2' WHERE area ='';

I had also missed the reconfiguration of the PCT in Hertfordshire which is now corrected in the downloads also (there is not a simple patch for that).

Sorry!

CPD+ on QOF Database

I tend to have a few ideas for projects floating around at a time, most of which come to nothing. One of these was an improved method for saving all of the stuff that I read for appraisal. At the time all that was out there was the official Appraisal Toolkit that was too horrible to use. Thankfully this is, if not quite dead, certainly having the curtains pulled around it.

I never actually managed more than about 20 lines of code as a proof of concept on this one but am very excited to find that those good folks at Healthcarerepublic have actually put finger to keyboard and written something very much along the same lines with their CPD+ system. It is also free, which is nice.

It is pretty basic at the moment but crucially it does allow one click to enter data into the log. There are instructions on the CPD + site but to make things even easier you can click on the CPD+ logo after every blog post at at the bottom of every table on the site. There is also a button at the bottom of each blog posting which is a stupidly complex thing to actually get into a Blogger template. Feel free to use the code yourselves.

I hope you find this useful.

2010 QOF data now online

I am delighted to be able to say that the data for 2010 is now available on the site. This is a little later than usual this year. This is a little due to a later publication of the data by the Information Centre and rather more due to my hard drive crashing. I still had the data but getting the system set up around it took a bit of time. I talk a little about that process on E-Health-Insider.

There is still a bit of work to do and I will get the database download going in the next few days.

More business rules strangeness - PP1

My thanks to Dr David Fitzsimons who has pointed out that it is not only depression that has suffered a ruleset that differs from the guidance. PP1 - the assessment of CVD risk in patients newly diagnosed with high blood pressure - features an almost identical change. Whilst the guidance suggests only the patients diagnosed in the past year should be counted the business rules carry forward all of the unassessed patients from the previous year. There is not a lot that a practice can do to avoid this, unless of course their hypertension has resolve (read code 212K ) in the meantime.

Depression is not what it seems

This week have been looking at the QOF progress in my own practice and I noticed that the depression figures seemed a little odd. The number of patients needing a second depression assessment (Dep 3) was rather larger than the number of patients needing the first assessement (Dep 2). According to the guidance the former should be a subset of the latter.

Just a reminder of what the indicator says

DEP 3: In those patients with a new diagnosis of depression and assessment of severity recorded between the preceding 1 April to 31 March, the percentage of patients who have had a further assessment of severity 5 – 12 weeks (inclusive) after the initial recording of the assessment of severity. Both assessments should be completed using an assessment tool validated for use in primary care.

Indeed the guidance goes on to say:-

New diagnoses are those which have been made between the preceding 1 April to 31 March.

Clear? There is a slightly odd consequence to this. FIt is difficult to count the need for assessment towards the end of the year. With a first assessment in January the second could be due after all of the data is sent to QMAS. This would tend to work in a practice's favour.

This was not what I actually saw on my practice figures. I looked at the latest version of the business rules (warning - highly geeky) and it seemed all was not well. These are the rules that govern the data that is sent to QMAS for payment and the data that ultimately appears on the QOF Database web site. This year's rule was looking way back past 1st April - back to the start of December 2009 looking for diagnoses.

I got in touch with the NHS Information Centre who are the latest organisation to be in charge of the business rules. It turns out that there is no mistake. The rules were set, in consultation with NHS Employers, to try to fix the issue described earlier. In the process the rules now contradict the wording of the indicator and the guidance.

So what do the rules now say? The "yes" and "no" groups have split slightly so it is worth specifying the numerator and denominator groups separately.

Numerator: Patients who have had a second assessment from the previous 1st April to 31st March. The second assessment must be between 5 and 12 weeks after the first and the first, in turn must be within four weeks after the diagnostic code.

Now the denominator :-

Denominator: Patients in the numerator (i.e. Yes)
and also patients for whom the date of 12 weeks following their first assessment is within the previous 1st April -31 March and who have not had that second assessment (i.e. No)

Those who you failed to get at the end of one year are carried over to the next. The successes are counted in the same year.

What does irk me is not the fact that this was changed - indicators are changed and improved over time - but that this alteration from the original meaning has never been announced anywhere other than the business rules. The description of the indicator, although clearly now misleading, has not been altered. Similarly the guidance remains inaccurate. The business rules are hardly the first port of call for a busy GP.