Healthcare Insights Archives

Background

For international pharmaceutical and diagnostics company, Roche, a core function of the organisation is the running of clinical trials for regulatory approval of new medications. In particular, the Insights and Analytics team is involved in supporting late-stage trials by identifying the most appropriate hospital locations and clinical trial patients for these trials across countries to enable the most effective recruitment process.

The Challenge:

Historically, clinical trial populations have often differed from the populations that use the medications, resulting in clinical trial patients being predominantly Caucasian and coming from more affluent socioeconomic backgrounds.

Regulations are evolving and regulatory agencies are driving a new view on diversity and inclusion in clinical trials.

Lack of data availability, legal barriers, data collection and protection and privacy issues are all common hurdles in clinical trials, especially in Europe.

The Solution:

By working with CACI, Roche’s Insights and Analytics team has used a combination of demographic and health variable data within CACI’s analytical and mapping tool, InSite, to determine locations that would best suit the recruitment of more diverse populations for clinical trials in five European markets.

With diversifying clinical trials being the team’s goal, the key variables they needed to understand included ethnicity, deprivation, education attainment, economic status, rural versus urban, smoking, pollution and other disease risk factors. CACI developed bespoke models for these variables by combining key demographics such as age, income and gender with survey data on a country-by-country basis to generate models at a postcode level for each of the required countries.

The Results:

While still in its early days, Roche’s Insights and Analytics team has already tremendously benefitted from CACI’s bespoke model and expertise, delivering the model to the team and providing training on how to use it. The
team has since been able to use data-driven decision-making to tackle any clinical trial strategisation obstacles versus relying on assumption.

Having previously worked with CACI on smaller, UK focused projects, the ability to now take this bespoke model to scale so that it can be accessed across other countries has augmented Roche’s diversity strategy, with the team particularly pleased by CACI’s quick data generation and innovation in terms of modelled data from survey data sources.

The innovative approach with CACI was taking all that demographic data collected across Europe, tagging it with running surveys, and modelling it based on… geographic locations of different populations. That allowed us to come up with some numbers in those various locations, which was something we couldn’t find anywhere else.

Jonathan Wharton, Portfolio Analytics Manager at Roche

Patient-Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS) are data collection and cost information tools used to collect and analyse patient data that will help measure and manage costs. They help NHS organisations make sense of the costs of delivering specific services to patients and find out where costs can be reduced or efficiencies can be maximised.

But how exactly do they work? And what makes them so beneficial for the NHS? We’ll be exploring this in this blog to help you make informed decisions about your own PLICS solution.

How do PLICS work?

PLICS collate data from a range of records and sources to give you intricate details into a patient’s diagnosis, treatment, length of stay at a hospital and more. Collecting patient data from diagnosis to treatment creates a granular and accurate picture of the associated costs that come with patient care– much more valuable than via traditional methods like top-down allocation costs.

PLICS can also calculate the cost of each patient’s care and treatment, allowing you to view patient variations in much greater detail. If you can leverage PLICS, you’ll find it incredibly powerful thanks to its ability to link cost data at patient level to guarantee optimal patient care outcomes. You can use this information to make informed decisions about treatments and resources for patients or even to negotiate insurance rate payments.

Benefits of using PLICS

PLICS can offer plenty of useful and accurate data on a case-by-case basis that exceeds the capabilities of traditional costing methods. Its range of benefits include:
• Gives managers and clinicians a detailed picture of costs to help them judge the legitimacy of costs across all patients.
• Shows any discrepancies that may be resulting in higher or lower costs across the organisation or pinpoint inefficiencies between teams to help determine what to do about them.
• Enhances the accuracy of budget projections and provides the necessary insights to model changes for patient groups.
• Highlights patient demographics and treatment pathways to optimise decision-making in resource allocation, process improvement and quality of care for patients.

PLICS use cases

PLICS data can be impactful in many instances, especially when validating cost variations. A successfully integrated PLICS will allow users to share their learnings on how to detect, diagnose and address cost variations across the wider organisation to change or improve costing processes.

To get a sense of just how much more than the NCC submission can be accomplished through a PLICS system, take a look at some of our client case studies:

CACI as your PLICS provider

Making sure you have the tools to effectively engage with stakeholders across your organisation is at the heart of what we do. We help equip you with the necessary skills to get the most out of your patient costing solution, meet your requirements and improve patient outcomes.

CACI’s very own PLICS, Synergy, is a state-of-the-art patient level costing solution complete with fast calculation times, exception analysis with full audit trails and patient activity mapping. It also comes with prepopulated standards (datasets, cost allocations and methodologies), which will enable you to produce costs easily and efficiently at patient level.

It’s an easy-to-use, simple to set up solution that is highly secure (HSCN connected facility), with Healthcare Costing Standards configured.

To learn more about PLICS and how our costing system could help your organisation, visit our Synergy page.

How Roche diversified international clinical trials through demographic & health variable data