The Johns Hopkins ACG® System Annual Symposium in Leicester is a Success

The Johns Hopkins ACG® System held its annual symposium at the Devonshire Place Conference Centre in Leicester on Tuesday 13th March.

The event was attended by an engaged audience of around 60 people, including ACG System users, those thinking of starting to use the ACG System and other stakeholders with an interest in population health management.

Dr. Dave Shepherd, GP and Health Need and Neighbourhood Chair of Leicester South, outlined a new and much more sophisticated approach of benchmarking to enable a fairer comparison between GP practices. This approach – that takes into account differences in casemix that exist between different practices – has attracted the attention of senior stakeholders across the NHS.

Dr. Jim O’Donnell from Slough CCG shared his experience of developing a primary care-based service for complex patients with multimorbidity and the extraordinary associated results. When the team realised that simply focusing on emergency admissions was not enabling them to achieve their emergency admission targets, a piece of population health analytics helped them to identify that multimorbidity was a key driver of cost in their population. They therefore set up a new primary care-based service to support people with multimorbidity, which has helped them to achieve their objectives for the first time.

Keynote speaker Melissa Sherry, M.P.H., Director of Population Health Innovation and Transformation at Johns Hopkins HealthCare, shared details about the approach to population health management in Baltimore, which was particularly relevant as the NHS begins to implement Integrated Care Systems.

Other population health analytics experts from Arden and Gem CSU and SCW CSU spoke about their experiences of using the ACG System, and the day finished with a fantastic presentation from Mark Pierce of Leicester City CCG, highlighting the key relationships between health, social care, local authorities, and the third sector.

Feedback from the day highlighted the following: “Subject talks by Chris Morris, Jim O’Donnell, Mark Pierce – passionate as ever;” “Excellent range of speakers and topics;” “Opportunity to hear numerous examples of how the ACG System is helping to make a difference to local systems in the UK and the opportunity to learn from these.”

The symposium was covered on the @HopkinsACG_UK Twitter feed using the hashtag #ACGLS2018

Attendees can view the conference materials here.