We hold one of the largest databases of healthcare-related compensation claims in the world, including more than 25 years’ worth of data on concerns raised about NHS care. To mark Know Your Numbers Week, running from September 5-11 2022, Sergej Daut, NHS Resolution Data Science Manager, describes his work in data science and how it supports our strategic priority to share data and insights as a catalyst for improvement.
Sergej, please tell us about your background and how you came to work at NHS Resolution
My background is quite varied and I trained in a variety of roles before coming to NHS Resolution. I started off in engineering, worked as a consultant, then in Business Intelligence (BI) in private healthcare, after which I joined NHS Resolution. I have been working with the data for more than 10 years, but it didn’t start that way, having begun my career in engineering. I have lived in a number of countries and several places in the UK, all of it was very useful. As a colleague of mine used to say: “You never know when you will use your experience, but you will use it one day”.
What is your role at NHS Resolution?
I am interested in looking at large data sets, analysing the data and data trends to spot usual and unusual patterns. These can tell us a lot about the causes of claims and how we may better handle them in the future. In addition, in the past year at NHS Resolution, I have been involved in data quality, data migration (for Practitioner Performance Advice and Claims Management), data analysis for HR and several other projects.
Please describe your work in data science
Currently we are working on Claim details prediction, such as claim outcome, value and settlement year. It is a challenging task, which involves pulling data from different sources, CMS, NHS digital, analysing text and understanding the complete picture of how the data fits together and to what extent it contributes to prediction accuracy.
As exciting as it sounds, it is a hard work on a daily basis, which involves dealing with data issues (sometimes the data is not unique, not available, not correct, not relevant), understanding the data, making judgements on what we should use and what we should not use. We also work with stakeholders and subject matter experts – people who deal and process the actual claims to better understand the process and build this experience into our models. Stakeholders are interested in our work and we both learning from each other.
Where do you think working for NHS Resolution brings the most value for you?
My team: Yuri, Simon, Elnas. They are great people and I would not trade them for anyone else! Also support from the BI team. They have a wealth of knowledge in data engineering and analytics that we need to leverage on as an organisation. We hold one of the largest databases of healthcare-related compensation claims in the world, meaning we have plenty of data to work with, which makes the work very interesting, yet challenging at the same time.
Our aim is understanding the data and sharing insights from it as a catalyst for improvement. For example, understanding reasons which drive claims and their volumes, causes and using these to predict claim details and reduce the number of claims is very empowering. Think about it this way, if we deliver something that reduces the value of claims by say 1% we will justify the existence of data science and BI teams many times over.
