Understanding your population and the factors contributing to their health is key to delivering effective, fair healthcare. This understanding is particularly important in helping the NHS shift its focus from reactive to preventative care. Through healthcare demographics, at-risk individuals can be identified and reached out to earlier, reducing the burden on NHS services and improving outcomes for patients and communities through a data-led approach to healthcare.
Healthcare demographics only paint part of the picture, however. A combination of demographic data with patient-level costing information allows healthcare services to understand patient demand, cost and service usage. This is where CACI’s integrated data solutions can make the greatest difference: supporting you in unlocking unparalleled insights into who uses healthcare services, why and when they are most likely to.
What are healthcare demographics and who are they for?
Healthcare demographics are the characteristics of a population that influence health outcomes, service usage and care needs. The characteristics range from basic identifiers such as age and location to more complex determinants such as income, ethnicity and lifestyle factors. Combining these characteristics ensures clinicians, commissioners and public health teams can understand who is most at risk and why.
In England, Wales and the Isle of Man, the NHS uses Personal Demographics Service (PDS), a database of all registered NHS patients who have ever sought help from NHS clinics, to collect data. It stores:
- Name
- Address
- Date of birth
- Contact details
- Registered GP
- Nominated pharmacy
- NHS number.
This supports direct care– clinicians or public health teams facilitating direct client or patient interactions– and non-direct care– information governance and data sharing.
Examples of demographic data in healthcare
Demographic data is used in healthcare in a range of scenarios, from frontline care to strategic planning. Some common examples of demographic data in healthcare include:
Adding new patients
Ensuring the accuracy and completion of new patient registrations helps maintain continuity of care and supports safe clinical decision-making.
Managing patient information
Keeping demographic data up to date ensures communications reach the right patients and minimises missed appointments, especially if or when patients change addresses or transfer GPs.
Designing targeted interventions
Analysing demographic and social characteristics cohesively enables healthcare teams to better identify high-risk populations or cohorts and devise targeted, preventative interventions before conditions escalate.
Why healthcare demographics matter now more than ever
Demographic data and insights have become strategic assets in offering integrated, preventative models of care. Through clean, connected data, healthcare teams can more effectively shift from sickness to prevention, gaining:
- A granular understanding of local health needs: Social determinants from housing quality to the environment can be mapped alongside clinical data to reveal the root causes of poor health and showcase where early prevention can have the greatest impact.
- Targeted interventions that reduce admissions: Identifying at‑risk individuals early on allows services to reach out before they reach crisis point, alleviating pressure on urgent and emergency care.
- Data‑driven planning and resource allocation: Real‑world population data supports smarter workforce planning, service design and long‑term transformation strategies that anticipate future demand rather than react to it.
This directly supports the NHS’ 10 Year Health Plan for England that will leverage new technologies, medicines and innovations to improve patient care, with three major shifts within this plan including:
- From hospital to community: More care at people’s doorsteps and in their homes
- From analogue to digital: New technology to support staff and simplify care management
- From sickness to prevention: Reach patients earlier and encourage healthier decision-making.
How CACI’s Acorn & Synergy help the NHS enhance preventative care
Data sits at the heart of everything we do at CACI. If you need a more comprehensive understanding of who uses your healthcare services, why they use them and the cost implications arising from each cohort of the population, CACI can help.
We deliver this by integrating its products and datasets. Through Synergy patient-level costing solution, Acorn, our geographic segmentation of the UK’s population at postcode level and Wellbeing Acorn, a deeper dive into Acorn’s population data to analyse social, health and wellbeing characteristics at postcode level, we can help you unlock unparalleled insights into who uses healthcare services, why and when they are most likely to.
This enables teams to ask critical questions such as:
- Which cohorts are over utilising services and driving higher costs?
- Can they be treated in a more efficient way?
- What opportunities are there to move from cure to prevention?
- What does future demand look like?
As a result, the NHS can act earlier through more effective and efficient engagement and focus on service delivery, prioritisation and long-term planning.
The features
- Industry leading data: CACI’s data solutions are proven and widely utilised across public and private sector organisations
- Supported by experts: Our data teams will support you in creating insights, interpreting them and gaining the information you need
- Combine your data: Easily identify cohorts driving high costs, highlight service demand by area and demographic and understand cost drivers
- A complete picture: From economic, income and employment factors to the impact of diet, smoking, alcohol and exercise on demographics and cohorts.
If you are already using Synergy, you can simply add Acorn’s data to your own costing data.
Contact us today to find out more about our healthcare data analytics solutions and how CACI’s data-led approach to healthcare can make a difference for your organisation.