A team of engineers and health researchers in South Yorkshire is redesigning NHS care for people with multiple long-term conditions as if it were a complex industrial system—mapping patient pathways, mining health data, and testing new models in near-real time. This matters because care for people with multiple long-term conditions—such as type 2 diabetes and chronic lung disease—is fragmented, transactional, and guided by one-size-fits-all rules. Patients and clinicians rarely have the space to make decisions that reflect personal values. The problem hits hardest in disadvantaged populations, which are overrepresented in South Yorkshire. If successful, the RESHAPE Innovation Hub will give the NHS a practical toolkit to deliver person-centred care at scale—improving disease outcomes, patient experience, and system efficiency simultaneously. The development phase builds the technical and collaborative foundations: defining what person-centred care means, decomposing patient pathways from the Connected Bradford dataset, testing methods on live data, and strengthening partnerships with the South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board. The project runs for 15 months and is not yet testing interventions—it is preparing the ground for a full hub that will engineer and evaluate real changes to healthcare delivery.
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BACKGROUND Care for Multiple Long Term Conditions (MLTC) is challenging when set against the triple aim of healthcare: optimal disease outcomes, efficient healthcare systems and excellent patient experience. Person-centred care, in which key treatment decisions involving personal values are made between patient and one or more trusted health professional(s) is an important way of addressing the triple aim. However care for MLTC is increasingly fragmented and transactional with one-size-fits-all guidelines. OVERALL AIM Re-Engineering Services for Health: maximising Person-centred Care (RESHAPE) aims to optimise achievement across the triple aim of healthcare in MLTC by enabling services to deliver more person centred care. To achieve this we will develop the RESHAPE Innovation Hub in South Yorkshire. The hub will use systems engineering methods to: 1) specify requirements; 2) process-mine data; 3) engineer change through developing, modifying and testing models of systems; and 4) implement and evaluate change in healthcare delivery in near-real time. The process-mining and engineering change components will involve multiple engineering techniques building on our experience of using them in other industries and public policy. DEVELOPMENT PHASE AIMS To build the foundations in terms of knowledge, technical methods, and collaborative working for the RESHAPE Innovation Hub. METHODS We will focus on care for people with MLTC who have either Type 2 Diabetes or Chronic Lung Disease. These are major problems for the NHS. Both involve primary and secondary care, and both are most common and have greatest impact in disadvantaged population groups. The Development Phase has four work packages (WPs): WP1 Defining person-centred care for MLTC This involves discussions with patients and health professionals and a review of current and emerging literature. WP2 Mapping what happens and how we understand it This involves analytical and conceptual work. The analytical work will use the Connected Bradford anonymised and linked healthcare data set to decompose individual patient pathways into many constituents and demonstrate proofs of concept for using these to specify simulation models for work in the full Innovation Hub. The conceptual work involves a series of multidisciplinary workshops with engineers, clinicians, patients, health data analysts and health services researchers. They will build a shared understanding between disciplines and comment on / contribute to the analytical work. WP3 Shortening the data cycle We will work with clinical partner organisations to develop collaborations and methods to enable advanced analytical methods to be implemented and tested with “live” data. WP4 Preparing the ground This involves strengthening existing collaborations between the many partners that will be involved in the full Innovation Hub. SETTING RESHAPE is based in South Yorkshire, an area with high levels of MLTC and deprivation. It represents a collaboration between two world-leading institutes within the University of Sheffield: the School of Health & Related Research (ScHARR) and the Centre for Automated Control Systems Engineering (ACSE). It has the support of senior managers of the South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board. PATIENT AND PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT People with MLTC will be represented at multiple levels, including on the project management group. TIMELINE The project runs for 15 months from 1st September 2023.
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