Predicting and Reducing Re-admission to Hospital

Between 2005 and 2007, The King’s Fund was commissioned to produce software tools and models to identify individuals at high-risk of re-admission to hospital. The aim was to help primary care trusts intervene and reduce future hospital admissions.

• The Department of Health has announced that it has no plans to commission updated versions of the predictive risk models, PARR++ and the Combined Predictive Model.
• Following this announcement, the existing models have been withdrawn from The King’s Fund website. The predictive accuracy of the existing models is likely to have declined over time and, as the models were developed to work with HRG3.5 data, they are not compatible with HRG4 data.
• The Department of Health will continue to make the tools available on its website. More information on this and long-term conditions can be found on the Department of Health website

In 2005, Essex Strategic Health Authority – on behalf of the Department of Health, the NHS Modernisation Agency and England’s strategic health authorities – commissioned The King’s Fund to develop a case-finding algorithm. The Department of Health took over the management of this contract in May 2007.

The King’s Fund worked with Health Dialog and New York University to develop two risk stratification models:

• the Patients at Risk of Re-hospitalisation (PARR) tool: a software tool that used inpatient data to identify patients at risk of re-hospitalisation within a year. The last  version, PARR++ was released in November 2007.
• the Combined Predictive Model: a model  that used inpatient, outpatient, A&E and GP data to stratify populations according to their risk of admission. In order to run this model, a software front-end needed to be built locally. The last version of this model was released in December 2006.

The intellectual property rights for both models is owned by the Department of Health.

The models are no longer available on this website. However, they can still be accessed on the Department of Health's website

The following resources can still be downloaded from The King's Fund website:

• predictive risk project literature review: summary (98 kb)
• predictive risk project literature review (186 kb)
• PARR case finding report (736 kb)
• Combined Predictive Model Final Report (450 kb)
• Croydon PCT case study (78 kb) .

You may also be interested to know that NHS Networks hosts a Risk Prediction Network where you can share knowledge and discuss all issues relating to risk prediction with others in the field.