About Graham Head

Hi, I'm Chief Information Officer at Sollis. It's my role to make sure the products and services we deliver at Sollis are right for the needs of the NHS, both now and in the future. I've worked in a range of public and private sector organisations, including roles in NHS IM&T over 20 years.
Hi, I'm Chief Information Officer at Sollis. It's my role to make sure the products and services we deliver at Sollis are right for the needs of the NHS, both now and in the future. I've worked in a range of public and private sector organisations, including roles in NHS IM&T over 20 years.

Population Segmentation for Population Health Management

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Impactibility

Questions of scale and scope in population segmentation. Macro-, meso- and micro-level population segmentation explained. This is an extract from a forthcoming Sollis white paper called Population Segmentation — An introduction to methods for identifying and supporting multiple diverse patient groups.

There is no simple numerical answer to the question of how large a population segment should be. Clearly, a cohort containing only one or two individuals might feel ill-defined and inappropriate as the target for a specific innovation or care programme; equally, a very large segment, covering most of the overall population, could be imprecise for many purposes, and not really actionable, while including significant variation. Read More…

Population Health Management by William Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare

For reasons that will become obvious by the end of this post, we at Sollis have recently been thinking quite a lot about Shakespeare. In particular, the moment in As You Like It when he has Jacques summarise the human condition. Shakespeare here seems to be acting almost as an early modern exponent of population health management.

Speaking through Jacques he divides the population – both men and women – into seven age bands.   He notes that throughout their lives, people move across segments (‘play many parts’), and he describes some of the characteristics of the people in each cohort.  This has some interesting features. Read More…

Geek Heresy

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Geek Heresy cracked technology

For various reasons I’ve had a lot of time to read recently, and I’ve just been given a book by an old friend. It’s called Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama. And despite being a little long-winded, I think it’s worth reading.
The main argument of the book is that technological solutions to social problems don’t work, or at least not on their own. There are no quick technological fixes. Read More…

Using Multiple Lenses: From Black Holes to Patient Activation

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Multiple Lenses - black holes to patient activation

In the realm of physics and astronomy research, combining data from multiple lenses has led to new discoveries about the universe. The same principle can be applied to patient data. When considering impactibility or patient activation, for example, a multiplicity of perspectives can lead to many new insights, crucial to successfully defining interventions to support specific groups. Making appropriate use of demographic, diagnostic, calculated, social, environmental and other perspectives, it becomes possible to meaningfully segment a local population and define appropriate interventions. Read More…

ChilCaldicott

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Caldicott Review

I don’t know. You wait and wait for an important, much-delayed report to be published and then suddenly, like buses, two come along together.

Yet tempted as I am by the thought of reading and commenting on all seventeen sections and twelve volumes of Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry report, I’m more taken by the latest offering from Dame Fiona Caldicott, our National Data Guardian for Health and Care. Read More…