A new report has been published on the use of a Management and Supervision Tool (MaST) at Mersey Care NHS FT, commissioned by the Academic Health Science Network for the north west coast.
Entitled ‘MaST: Evaluation of the impact of the use of Management and Supervision Tool in Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust,’ the 33-page document focuses on the impact of the digital dashboard – which uses predictive analytics to help healthcare professionals assess and manage their caseloads – on community health services at the trust.
Providing some background on the purpose of MaST, the document states the decision support tool enables mental health teams to analyse information from multiple sources to make ‘better’ decisions about the resources they use and provide ‘safer’ and ‘higher-quality’ care.
The aim of the evaluation was to examine the impact of MaST on service user flow, improved management of mental health crisis in the community, resource use and cost saving, quality and safety performance indicators, and caseload management.
Additionally, the report provides a summary of the key findings discovered, which highlight the length of inpatient stays following a mental health crisis reduced, and that an efficiency saving of £1.7 million in the six-month period after its implementation has been estimated.
The report goes on to note a decline in its mental health crisis rate, indicating that MaST may be associated with fewer mental health-related crisis admissions.
Laura Boland, Innovation Insight Programme Manager at the Innovation Agency, said of the new report: “We knew that MaST could deliver impressive results and we wanted to support its implementation with a report that would underline its potential.
“The software can help prevent relapses, reduce hospital admissions and give a better all-round patient experience, as well as help teams organise themselves more effectively.”
Adam Drage, Clinical Service Lead at Mersey Care, added: “MaST allows us to see where the risk and complexity is in our caseloads, so that we can prioritise who we need to see right now and who might be ready to move on to a different care pathway.
“We have the right data and intelligence to inform safer decisions about the people on our caseloads. MaST is a solution which helps clinicians, team managers and strategic leaders to understand our community service caseloads.”
To read the report on the MaST software in full, please click here.
