We have been working to improve the Sexual Health Grouper service.  This work has mostly been focused on facilitating a more flexible approach to adopting the Integrated Sexual Health Tairff (ISHT) by allowing participants to adopt at their own pace and using their own criteria.

Most significantly, these new features will allow for a group of commissioners and providers to adopt a tariff with their own price and even their own currency definitions.

Required Action

On the whole, you should continue as normal, but:

Providers: Prepare a list of your clinic addresses for each of the Clinic IDs you use in your data.  The next time you upload data, clinics will automatically be located at your Organisation's address (if we hold it).  Under a new menu item,  'My Clinics', you will need to locate each of your clinics with their own address.  This will allow the Grouper to identify the appropriate host commissioner.  

You will now no longer need to share the LSOA Not Known activity with your local host Commissioner.

Commissioners:  Check the new Hosted Clinics menu item for clinics located within your Borough boundaries.

Detailed Update

We will shortly be releasing the following updates to the Grouper service (within the first 2 weeks of November 2015):

• Processing time.  We have continued to improve the time it takes to process files, we have taken further steps to streamline the calculations and reduce the time it takes to both validate files and return the tariff calculations.  As before, providers can subscribe to an email alerts notifying them of a completed upload or submission.
• Validation error handling.  We have improved the handling of validation errors for uploaded files.  In future providers will be able to make a single correction for a recurring error, for example if a wrong code has been used for gender not specified in the data then all the affected records can be corrected in a single action. 

• Organisation ID.  There is no longer any need to insert the Organisation ID field into provider data.  The Organisation ID is now derived from the selected month of submission and therefore there is now no need for providers to insert it into the data file. 
• Uploaded data column headings.  The grouper had previously recognised column headings specified in the Tariff Dataset, however, we noticed that many fields in file uploads were not being recognised because the column matching process we had in place was causing confusion.  We have therefore increased the range of names for each column heading that are automatically matched, for example, sex-ori, sex_ori (both commonly used abbreviations for this column) are now both automatically matched to the column heading Sexual Orientation.  If you would like your specific headings matched, please let us know what they are - then when you upload your data they will match automatically.
• Responsible commissioner.  The grouper now automatically looks up the responsible commissioner directly from the the field 'LSOA of Residence' (the patient's residence), the correct Local Authority code is then used from ONS to identify the responsible commissioner.  The fields 'LA District of Residence' and 'PCT of GP Registration' are no longer used.  Providers do not have translate LSOA or PCT to Local Authority and now all data will be recorded against Local Authority rather than PCT.
• Hosted clinics.  Clinics are now associated with a specific 'host' commissioner as well as a provider.  When providers upload data, we check to see if we hold a location for the Clinic ID, if not, the provider will need to locate the clinic on a map before they can submit their data.  Providers can use a postcode, address or in some cases just the clinic name will be enough to locate the clinic.  Commissioners can review the clinics located within their local authority boundary.  The Clinic ID is taken from the data field Clinic ID in the Provider data files.  This feature will allow providers to upload data centrally wherever their clinics are located and bill local commissioners automatically for 'LSOA Not Knowns'.  In the example below, a ficticioius provider has clinics located around London in several different London Boroughs. 

• Local currencies and local tariffs.  We have implemented a new Contract Manager role this role can create their own contracts with their own local currencies and local tariffs for the providers and commissioners they select to participate in their contracts.  The basic tariff prices they negotiate within their contracts are then available to charge out of area commissioners for non-contracted activity arising from these contracts.  The example below shows a selection of providers and commissioners participating in a local tariff arrangement of two 'First' and 'Follow-up' currencies.  The criteria for the 'First' currency are highlighted below. 

• Contract start and finish dates.  Each Contract has a start date and finish date, data submitted for the months between the contract start and finish dates will be applied to the contract. 
• Contract status, Draft, Shadow, Live.  Each Contract will have a status of either Draft, Shadow or Live.  Draft, will allow the Contract Manager to develop the Contract details, Shadow will publish the contract so that participants can see and use it, however the data is labelled Shadow; Live will publish the Contract details and the data will be labelled Live.  Once a contract is in Shadow or Live the only item that can be changed in the Contract is the Contract Finish date which can be changed to a date that must be later than the current month.

Not Yet Supported

The following proposed developments have not yet been supported by London Sexual Health Transformation Project.  If you have a particular desire for any of these please contact enquiries@pathwayanalytics.com to discuss development options.

• Thresholds, caps and marginal rates.  Commissioners will now also be allowed to set any number of local thresholds, marginal rates and caps for each currency and each participating provider within their contract.  The example below show how a selected currency is being charged at different rates once certain thresholds have been crossed.  
   

Yet to come will include:

• Clinic level MFF.  Allow commissioners to set locally agreed Market Forces Factors (MFF) for each clinic so that out of area providers can offer clinics with locally relevant MFFs. 
• Improved data presentation and analysis.
• KPI management and improved dashboard.