Project overview:

NHS Health Checks are a proactive healthcare initiative designed to assess and improve the health of adults aged 40-74 who are currently not diagnosed with cardiovascular disease or diabetes. These conditions make up the largest collective cause of preventable deaths in the UK, with around 7 million people affected by them.

This programme forms part of the wider “Your Healthier Future” initiative being offered to practices throughout Cambridgeshire & Peterborough ICB to support cardiovascular population health management.

There are two tiers of support on offer to improve the uptake of health checks for eligible patients at your practice:

1. Eclipse Detect – Activation of this programme will commence the Health Check Pathway within Eclipse, providing a list of all eligible patients, alongside additional priority groups, which can be further filtered and prioritised by parameters such as levels of deprivation, ethnicity, comorbidities and risk. Practices can then engage with these patient groups to offer a health check.

2. Eclipse Complete – Activation of this programme will automatically engage with prioritised patients via the PEGASUS platform to inform, educate and invite patients to attend a health check via an online questionnaire. This questionnaire includes questions around lifestyle, family history, height, and weight to improve the efficiency of the health check assessment. If desired, telephone patient engagement to non-responders can be activated to allow a team of motivational interviewers to contact your patients to complete the questionnaire. Practices can activate Eclipse’s online booking system to allow responders to automatically book in to health check clinics.

The solution being offered utilises Eclipse’s digital patient engagement platform which will automatically identify your eligible patients, engage with them via SMS, educate and counsel them using a lander page and consenting them to undergo an NHS health check via access to their secure questionnaire portal.

COHORTS:

The cohort will be those eligible for and overdue an NHS health check. Eclipse will enable prioritisation of eligible patients in relation to health care needs.

Once the patients have completed their health check questionnaires, they will be further segmented within the system into cohorts based on the patient preferences and actions required e.g. “patients consented and booked in for a health check”, “patients consented but with accessibility issues” etc.

REMUNERATION:

This patient support programme is part of the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Your Healthier Future programme. There will be some additional funding for practices participating in this programme, which is in addition to the standard remuneration for undertaking health checks. Practices have three choices:

1. Eclipse Detect - Practices that would like to activate Eclipse Detect to risk stratify and identify patients requiring prioritised health check reviews, will undertake patient engagement and patient recalls through their own practice team. Payment to practice is set at £1,000 if the target* is met.

2. Eclipse Complete - Practices that would like to activate Eclipse Complete will have all patient engagement and recalls undertaken for them through a centralised patient support hub. Payment to practice is set at £400.

3. No participation - Practices that would not like to utilise either Eclipse Detect or Complete will not receive any additional financial remuneration for the health check programme. Practices will continue to receive their full standardised payments for undertaking health checks. 

*Individual practice targets will be based on an average of the proceeding 2 years of practice performance for each of the metrics being targeted in the Your Healthier Future programme. These targets have been approved by the ICB and require an equal effort from all practices within an upper and lower threshold.

EVALUATION: As well as quantitative data, which will be collected via Eclipse, patient reported outcomes and perceptions of the new pathway will be collected through patient questionnaires.

If your practice would like to take part: Please complete the below pro forma, expressing your interest and permissions for patient engagement.

Please note that you will be notified prior to any active patient engagement, and your practice will be issued with a guide on how to view patient lists and document patient reviews.