OAC is key to NHS personal health profiler

OAC is being used by the NHS to create personalized health messages in an online health risk profiler. This is one of the tools in the NHS Health Choices package. OACUG welcomes this development and would like to hear about and publicise other uses of OAC in health services.

Part of the NHS Health Choices site which provides the public with an array of health information for England is a “health risk” profiler which generates a “personalized message” using a person’s, age, gender, and locality linking this through OAC to health data.

The profiler is found via ‘tools’ in the menu bar on the Health Choices home page, and then near the end of several pages of a wide range of tools on offer

The profiler explains now a message is generated (once an actual profile has been run):

“The local health risk profiler makes it possible for you to see the likely risk of certain conditions applicable to you based on your age, gender and postcode. It works by taking the profile of people that share those characteristics and plotting the admissions to their hospitals as a trend over time through life [through a graph of risk by age].

Your local health risk profile is based on the information you provided and shows the overall risks to people in your area, rather than the risk to you as an individual. This information does not replace advice you would receive from your GP.”

There is no specific reference to OAC, so it runs in the background, but its use is explained in a methodological note (pdf). This note is apparently not directly available to the users of the Health Choices site, but we are aiming to find out more about this significant application of OAC.

If you have more information on the application of OAC in the health services, and may be would like to see it publicised through OACUG, please contact [Chris Denham]