Axa Health is introducing a range of measures to tighten up practice and compare and inform hospitals and healthcare providers around clinical performance and patient safety.
The insurer is working on a dashboard and league tables which it will use to compare how its network providers are performing with regards to patient safety and clinical complaints.
It is also establishing a patient safety forum where it will bring together the heads of major hospitals and acute healthcare providers to discuss patient safety incidents.
It has made the move as it found suspending the privileges of specialists or practitioners who provided poor quality care was not enough to force change and improve communication.
The league tables and inaugural Patient Safety Forum next month form part of the insurer’s work to drive the sharing of information throughout private medical insurance (PMI) and the healthcare sector as a whole.
Comparing data ‘conductive to improving’
Dr Pallavi Bradshaw, deputy chief medical officer of Axa Health, revealed the details at Laing Buisson’s Private Acute Healthcare Conference.
She told delegates that the insurer is looking into the area of complaints and revealed that while historically, where a member had a complaint, they would be directed back to the provider, it is also trying to collect data around clinical complaints to identify trends.
“We’re having the anonymised data and meeting with the providers,” Dr Bradshaw continued.
“We will hopefully, once we’ve built a dashboard, be able to show providers where they sit in comparison to each other, and we know that showing that sort of outline data is certainly conductive to people improving.”
Dr Bradshaw also told delegates that a lot of the work she carries out is around fraud and audit and it was not enough to just suspend the privileges of specialists or practitioners that fall foul of regulations or guidance.
“It’s very interesting to see that you follow the money often and you follow all practice and that’s how we often pick up some of the poor practice that’s happened,” Dr Bradshaw added.
“But we’re also reliant on external governance through the GMC [General Medical Council], through CQC [Care Quality Commission].
“We’re running our own fitness to practice processes so we ensure if there are specialists or practitioners out there that we believe are falling foul of regulations or guidance, that we’re not only suspending their privileges with Axa because that’s great and it protects our members, but what is that doing for the wider patient population?
“We can’t just wash our hands of that. We have a moral obligation so we’re certainly doing some of that work as well and we’re encouraging more discussions.”
Hopsital chiefs to meet governance team
Consequently, Axa Health is going to be hosting its first patient safety forum in November.
“We’re bringing together all the clinical governance teams from the big acute providers, the medical directors and COOs and our clinical governance team, to start talking about patient incidents that we have become aware of,” Dr Bradshaw told delegates.
“We’re going to start sharing that information.”
But Dr Bradshaw explained that patient safety needs to extend across the board.
“We recently had an incident which related to a product, which we are sharing with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). I’ve shared that with NHS Resolution because ultimately this is a healthcare sector problem,” she continued.
“We can’t just sit here in PMI and private healthcare; there’s got to be patient safety across the board.
“This is not commercial interests, it is because obviously good patient outcomes make commercial sense, but it’s really about making sure that collaboration and fostering and building that open culture.”
Bradshaw added that the healthcare industry can talk about the various scandals that have hit the sector such as where shamed surgeon Ian Paterson was able to put hundreds of women through unnecessary operations, but asked what the ultimate basis was for these discussions?
“It’s not learning,” she continued. “It’s not being open and transparent.
“This is our hope with this Patient Safety Forum that we can start building that and showing we’re not here to penalise. We support providers and have some thought leadership.”
