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Heart Failure Dashboard

Originally developed with AstraZeneca and now maintained by CSL for exclusive use for NHS teams

The CHALLENGE

Improve variation in care for patients with Heart Failure

Heart failure (HF) affects hundreds of thousands of patients across England, yet care is often reactive and there is significant variation in outcomes across Trusts and ICBs.

Working in partnership with two cardiologists championing improvements in HF care, AstraZeneca approached CSL with a clear ambition: Move beyond palliative-only management and equip HCPs, ICS payers and policymakers with the evidence to optimise pathways, allocate resources more effectively and improve patient outcomes. 

The team need a way to:

  • Quantify the local burden of HF across every ICB and Trust in England
  • Identify variation in care — from coding quality through to admissions, readmissions and mortality
  • Provide a quarterly-refreshed, trusted evidence base that clinicians, commissioners and improvement leads could use in real conversations

Doing this at national scale required specialist access to HES, robust data engineering, and a design that could facilitate non-analyst users to act on.

CSL's Approach

Visualise HES and QOF data to facilitate decision-making

Working in close collaboration with AstraZeneca, CSL built an interactive, web-based Heart Failure Dashboard. CSL scoped the relevant HES data, and supplemented it with additional data from QOF. 

Key elements of the solution:

  • Curated HES build for HF. A bespoke data warehouse was created specifically for the Heart Failure Dashboard and the data refreshed when available.
  • Integrated metric framework. The dashboard brings together Prevalence & QOF, Demographics, Admissions and Outpatient Appointments, Length of Stay & Cost, Readmissions, In-Hospital Mortality and Patient Pathway in a single, navigable view.
  • Benchmarking by design. Users can compare their Trust or ICB against England and against peer organisations, making variation in care immediately visible.
  • Managed service. CSL handles data ingestion, quality checks, quarterly refreshes and website hosting – the user just logs in and explores.

Outcomes

Clear, structured data allowed real service improvements

The dashboard achieved 80+ active users across NHS Trusts that were using the dashboard to better understand their local HF population, target improvement activity, and evidence business cases.

Quarterly refreshes keep the picture current, so conversations with clinical teams are based on the latest available HES trends rather than historic snapshots.

Real service-improvement decisions. In a workshop with a Trust heart failure team, the dashboard directly informed two agreed improvement actions:

  • Improving HF phenotype coding — inconsistent recording surfaced by local outputs led to strengthened communication with GP practices on recommended SNOMED CT codes at discharge, supported by standardised discharge wording and targeted primary care messaging.
  • Reducing avoidable admissions — peer benchmarking flagged a very high HF admission rate versus similar Trusts. The team is now using the tool to target high-burden practice groups for coding, pathway optimisation, and clinically appropriate consideration of patients who may warrant assessment for ATTR-CM.

Interested?

Access the Heart Failure Dashboard to make HES informed decisions

If you are an NHS professional working in Heart Failure improvement, contact us for access.