Visualisation of the service use for individual clients with a Personality Disorder at Devon Partnership Trust to support clinical decision making

Abstract

In Devon (county in South West England) the mental health services are provided by Devon Partnership Trust (DPT). DPT are aware that clients diagnosed with a Personality Disorder (PD) utilise a large volume of their services, which comes with the associated high cost. DPT commissioned a project to help them understand the patterns and trends that PD clients access their services, to inform decisions regarding system improvements. As part of this project we developed clear visualisations of individual client's service use, based on reported techniques to visualise temporal data. This visualisation captures and delivers the information in an easily accessible format, thus offering clinicians a visualisation tool to use both before and during a patient consultation that has the potential to save resources. (1) Time saved: A quick glance at the graphic provides information to a clinician that would otherwise require up to 20 minutes to scan pages of text; (2) Appointments saved: Using the graphic during client consultations to aid the discussions regarding their previous service use, and to explore together patterns of previous service use that did not have the desired outcome (preventing repetition). In response to the clinicians enthusiasm to have access to these individual client service use graphics, DPT plan to electronically embed the service use visualisations within their existing Carenotes so that they can be produced automatically on demand from data already on their system. Discussions are ongoing to tailor the visualisations to embed more information (such as waiting times, number of contacts and cost of services).