Blog Part 1: Harnessing tech to obtain fast, accurate insight into patient cohorts

At the BHIVA Annual Conference earlier this year, we heard how there are more people with HIV in England that have dropped out of care than remain undiagnosed .

There are many factors that contribute to this issue and no quick fix solution. However, technology has an important role to play in helping services take control and reduce loss to follow up.

One of the ways technology, like Inform HIV, can do this is by helping services to understand patient cohorts better; providing the ability to identify active HIV care cohorts and the time since patients’ last interactions with the service via automated reporting.

These reports are fed by HARS record data that captures key demographics and any form of service interaction – be it online, telephone, or face-to-face. This is then combined with a cohort status, which flags the patient as active or inactive depending on whether the service is expecting further interaction with the patient or if they know the patient will no longer be accessing their service for HIV care.

This provides services with fast, accurate insight into their patient cohorts. It allows services to easily analyse when patients last engaged with care. This is enhanced via data visualisation, which empowers services to drill down into graphical reports to see who the at-risk patients are, as well as those who have already disengaged.

Technology can also group patients by multiple service defined factors, from length of time since the last service interaction to demographic data (i.e., problematic substance use, ethnicity, or religion) which can facilitate more pro-active and targeted activity to support retention and re-engagement.

Fast, accurate insight into patient cohorts can help reduce the number of patients dropping out of HIV care. Another way technology can support this objective is by automating retention/reengagement processes.

In our next instalment of our HIV patient retention blog series, we’ll be exploring this in more detail and highlighting the role automation plays in helping services to work smarter, not harder.

To learn more about how Inform HIV and the PHR can support your service to better manage loss to follow up click here.