Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action (CIPHA)

The NHS CIPHA programme supports health and care systems across the country develop their population’s health by providing the insights which help them target actions, measure impact and transform services.

CIPHA combines local and national feeds, including Pillar 2 community testing data and NIMS data, and makes it available in the CareCentric population health platform, with real-time analytics and dashboards presenting information to allow prompt co-ordinated actions at the local level and across ICSs.

In addition, the programme collaborates on developing and documenting use cases which can then be picked up by other health and care systems and implemented more widely. Its ambition is to accelerate the process of transformation and develop new care pathways.

Current use cases for CIPHA include:

• Patient treatment list stratification using population data to manage the waiting list
• Pulse oximetry and Personal Health Records (PHRs)
• Virtual wards – to optimise the management of long term conditions such as blood pressure monitoring in hypertensive patients

Other use cases identified as priorities by member organisations include complex care (multi-morbidity), cancer, suicide prevention and early intervention.

These are in addition to use cases already developed as part of the pandemic response – the Covid radar, for example, and mass testing dashboards.

About CIPHA

The population health management platform CIPHA is a collaboration involving the NHS, local government and academia.  It was initiated in Cheshire & Merseyside in April 2020, when two C&M COVID-19 resilience cells identified the need for a real-time analytics platform to manage the crisis and drive a strong recovery.

The original programme went live across 40 organisations and 359 GP practices in just 3 months, providing dashboards covering three broad areas: capacity and demand; epidemiology; and population stratification. In addition, nearly 100 reports are provided to over 1,000 users across the system.  

CIPHA is fully embedded locally, is central to the region’s response and recovery, including virtual ward programmes, and is now being extended elsewhere across England.  It is also key to mass testing, vaccine delivery and national investigations on re-opening events.  

Today CIPHA covers a population of 17m and is still growing.  

Care systems and transformation teams around the country are now developing use cases, documenting them, and sharing them across the NHS and social care. 

The CIPHA programme is also acting as an enabler, supporting ICSs with access to data sets and with the development of technical capabilities required for mature population analytics. It is also being used as a trusted research environment, the system-wide linked data providing an analytics development site for national research projects.  

For more information: visit https://www.cipha.nhs.uk/

Learn more about CIPHA here. To learn how the CareCentric population health solution could support care in your community, get in touch with us here.