National Medicines Optimisation Opportunities Dashboard (ePACT2)
The NHS England (NHSE) Medicines Optimisation Executive Group identified and agreed 16 national medicines optimisation opportunities for the NHS to deliver on integrated care boards’ (ICBs) 4 key objectives.
ICBs were advised to choose at least five medicines optimisation opportunities to focus on and deliver alongside their local medicines optimisation priorities.
The challenge was that the opportunities were spread across diverse areas of the NHS including primary care, secondary care and generalist and specialist areas. Data and tools to monitor these areas were also spread across a variety of organisations and platforms with different methods to access data, analysis, and reports.
This often resulted in a 'siloed' approach with areas of activity concentrated in a single area, or a single convenient data source.
NHSE commissioned the NHSBSA to help tackle this problem by creating a single 'page' for NHS organisations to see metrics that describe their situation in respect of national priority areas with the objectives to:
- enable local prioritisation decisions between different national priority areas
- make already existing information more accessible
- highlight how NHS organisations compare to one another across multiple topics
Working in collaboration with NHSE, who led on a 'metric stocktake' with engagement from key stakeholder groups, the NHSBSA created a single ePACT2 dashboard that addressed the objectives.
This required the deployment of different technical approaches to onboard and use external data. In addition to the collaboration with NHSE we also worked closely with a range of users. We led user workshops with Regional Chief Pharmacists, ICB Medicines Optimisation leads and the wider ePACT2 user base to elicit feedback which informed the development of the ePACT2 dashboard.
NHSE and NHSBSA jointly tested the dashboard and produced supporting documentation and continue to scope and add new metrics when required.
This collaboration has resulted in an improved output, as evidenced by ePACT2 usage which has remained high since the launch even when compared with other popular dashboards.