News / HFMA 2014: Data sharing key for mental health

Speaking at a workshop on the opening day of the conference, Drew Kendall associate director of finance at Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV) said the sector had made significant progress in collecting data to inform service development and contracting. This had been driven by the introduction of care clusters as the main currency for contracting for adult services and the work around quality measures. 'But 2015/16 has to be the year where we get the data out there,' he said. 'That is how we will drive data quality.'

Mr Kendall said that Monitor's recent tariff guidance was helpful in setting a clear direction of travel. The guidance re-emphasised that care clusters should be the default payment arrangement and reporting unit and that the sector should be moving towards the elimination of 'unaccountable block contracts'.

Mr Kendall said the key was to present the data to clinicians that they wanted to see in a format they could interpret quickly. TEWV is using a tree mapping approach to display quality, finance and activity data to clinicians and other users in an integrated information centre that also provides alerts and prompts on required activities.

The session also heard from North Essex, where the health economy has been working towards implementing the first real cluster-based cost and volume contract in 2014/15. Although not yet live, the contract aims to cover a third of all adult services, focused initially on non-admitted, non-psychotic super-cluster activity. With three clinical commissioning groups buying services from North Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust, a trust-wide price across all the commissioners has been agreed - an approach that has required some rebasing of funding across the commissioners.

Risk sharing involves a marginal rate and cap and collar mechanisms for different activity.