LUCI: Improving care through research and data
One year on from its implementation, we spoke to the LUCI team about how the platform is helping to support outcomes for patients and deliver better care by addressing unmet needs on a wider scale.
LUCI (Locating Useful Clinical Information) is a digital platform that draws information from multiple sources to show clinicians data to support them with making decisions. The platform makes use of a decade’s worth of research from the Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre in Natural Language Processing to gather data from clinician’s notes.
Although LUCI started as a proof of concept, it was awarded funding from Maudsley Charity to integrate the platform into our daily processes. The key focus is improving the lives and outcomes of our patients, their carers and families.
Putting our patients first on a wider scale
Patient wishes are at the forefront of the data selection process, meaning we only use data you have consented to us using. We use this data to help us make decisions and create population wide findings to influence where we want to place our focus as a mental healthcare provider.
LUCI makes data accessible and useable for everyone in the organisation, not just data experts, meaning frontline staff are supported in their decision-making with data to back up and influence their decisions.
Three key areas of improvement were identified and outlined to Maudsley Charity to secure funding for this project: releasing time to care, motivating action on inequalities and addressing unmet needs.
Processing information quicker to improve how we use our time to care
We know that each person has their own complex histories with medications including reactions, side effects and how well they have worked in the past. With LUCI, this data is searched for and collated, helping make decisions about what we prescribe. This makes what was previously an 8-hour process take as little as one hour, meaning our teams have more time to support patients in a holistic and human focused way.
In addition to medication, there is significant time saved on administrative duties such as zoning meetings, triaging referrals, and duplication reduction. LUCI interfaces with our other systems meaning information won’t be lost or misplaced, giving us a fuller and clearer picture of your needs and preferences.
Building ways to understand the inequalities our patients face
Over the past year, the team has seen several successes in reducing inequalities with LUCI. One key focus has been on understanding the inequalities on the delivery of psychological interventions such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in psychosis.
Data found significant inequality in the delivery of CBT with fewer black men being able to benefit from this kind of intervention. To address this inequality, the team worked alongside psychologists offering bespoke interventions that would be tailored to support this group in a culturally informed way. LUCI facilitated targeted delivery of this intervention to men who may benefit from it rather than using a one size fits all approach.
Additionally, our Chief Medical Officer Derek Tracy is exploring how many people have access to interventions that we know work, such as clozapine. Our data shows that black men and woman are much less likely to be prescribed clozapine, a long lasting and proven intervention. It is early days, but the team are exploring how to address this and support our service users further in their recovery.
Derek Tracy said: “This early work is showing that many people are on oral antipsychotic medications but not taking them. We are establishing a plan with colleagues in pharmacy, our doctors and our nurses, to see how many of these individuals might benefit from switching to very long-acting injectable forms of treatment. It's a great example of how we can use LUCI to measure clinical effectiveness and actively intervene to improve the care we provide.”
Addressing unmet needs in physical healthcare
Research shows that people with serious mental illness are estimated to die 15 to 20 years earlier than other members of the community. One of the biggest factors for this is cardiovascular disease such as angina, heart attacks (myocardial infarctions), strokes, heart failure, deep vein thrombosis and cardiac arrest.
We’re now able to see where patients may have an increased risk of developing these issues. Previously, we lacked the tools to easily identify patients who were developing risk factors for cardiovascular disease - with data, identification is much easier, and we can push forward with interventions and support to help people live longer and healthier lives.
Working in collaboration with our staff and service users
The platform is strongly supported by the patient and public involvement (PPI) groups, meaning that patients and carers are at the heart of any major decisions we make and help us to shape the future of their care.
Coproducing and working together with our clinical workforce across all stages of this project has made the platform feel like “a system that is owned by the organisation, by frontline staff and is designed to help them.”
Moving toward data-driven healthcare
David Codling said: “We hope that as a Trust, we start to move more toward data-driven healthcare and focusing on the whole population in our ways of working.
Often, we build teams that are designed to be great at delivering certain packages of interventions, but we don’t always have good systems for delivering bespoke, specialist care to patients with more complex needs who aren’t benefitting from those interventions.
We now have a data system that is being used by frontline clinicians, it is trusted, and it is responsive meaning that we can move closer toward care driven by patient needs. We can identify the populations of patients who would benefit from more specialised intervention without taking the time with trial and error to best meet their needs.”
There is plenty more to come from the LUCI team over the next 12 months!
