USING DATA ANALYTICS TO EXPLORE THE CONNECTION AND IMPACT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE AND ECONOMICS IN THE WORLD OF HEALTHCARE

The goal of this project is to connect social science with economics to make healthcare as effective, safe, patient-centred, and cost-efficient as possible. This project extends previous research and domains, such as traditional healthcare informatics and economics, by investigating the combination of these aspects rather than examining them isolated from each other. To reach the goal of the project, a range of data analytics techniques will be explored to first link clinical, cost and care data, then understand the driving factors from both successful and unsuccessful scenarios, and finally build a robust decision tool to assist the delivery of efficient and effective high-quality care.

This project will consider the field around burn injury care as a base case to explore the connection and impact of social science and economics in the world of healthcare. This choice is motivated by several factors including the nature of burns injuries - burns care affects patients across all age groups from different social classes - and access to a comprehensive patient and cost database (the project will have access to the most comprehensive collection of clinical and economics data concerning burn injury covering England and Wales admissions to NHS-specialised burn care services). Connecting these two databases in a meaningful way will be the first milestone of the project. Following this, the next step will be to augment the database with information about care pathways for burns injury patients and social class indicators. This comprehensive database will serve as a solid foundation to explore key drivers, and relationships and patterns in the data using a range of data analytics techniques. The stakeholders involved in this project (academia, industry, and government) are keen to answer a number of questions including:

What are the key drivers when predicting burns mortality and how accurately can we predict mortality?
What can we learn about decisions made in the past decade (this is the timespan of our clinical data) in terms of the success rate of care pathways and evolution of costs?
What is the relationship between a successful patients care path and the associated costs?
How do the social characteristics - such as social class of - a patient mediate the quality of care received?
Can we divide patients into cost and/or social groups to enable robust cost predictions?
Can we suggest personalized care pathways that are more effective and cost-efficient, and safer than the pathways implemented by the government at the moment?
How can we make use of the knowledge gained in this study to develop a practical decision tool to assist the delivery of patient centred and cost efficient care?

The findings of this project will have an impact across the domains of science (novel insights and data analytics models for characterising and predicting efficient care pathways, mortality of burns injury patients, patient groups in terms of costs levels), industry (a practical decision tool to facilitate the implementation of more efficient delivery of care of burns injury patients), and government (novel insights into key drivers for successful care pathways and an improved strategy for cost grouping of patients to support the NHS in the commissioning and remuneration of burn services based on patient-level costing). The findings will also serve as the foundation and inspiration for future data analytics studies linking the healthcare sector with social science.