Local Digital Projects Updates

NHS England has announced it has awarded the contract to provide the Federated Data Platform (FDP) to a group led by Palantir Technologies UK, with support from Accenture, PwC, NECS and Carnall Farrar.

NHSE says the intention is to roll out the software from spring next year, with the aim of joining up information from across NHS systems to help improve care through better management of available data.

The FDP and the West Midlands Secure Data Environment are both major NHS-led initiatives. Although they are both being delivered at the same time, they have very different purposes and operating methods. The table below outlines some of those differences. Further information on the NHSE Federated Data Platform and opportunity to raise any questions you may have about the FDP can be found here:

Home - NHS Federated Data Platform (england.nhs.uk)

West Midlands Secure Data Environment

Federated Data Platform

• The WMSDE will provide an environment in which researchers can safely and securely access and then analyse health data from across the West Midlands to deliver innovation, developing new medicines and treatments and benefiting everyone living in the region

• The federated data platform is software that will sit across existing systems and connect them. It is designed to enable better management of the data currently held in trusts, regions and ICSs

• While the WMSDE will always look to progress in order to increase the benefits to patients and the public, its focus is:

·    to initially bring data onto the platform against specific data use cases that address local problems, using local patient data, to return local benefits.

·    to provide the infrastructure for specific research projects with their own ethical approvals

• The FDP will bring together information from hospital health records, waiting lists, and theatre and staff rosters to better manage patient care. It will use existing data for analysing activity, auditing quality, planning service delivery, and service analysis to improve patient outcomes

• The WMSDE will link primary and secondary care data to provide researchers with a more complete picture of people’s health and people’s health journeys. This will greatly increase what can be learned and the resulting patient benefits

• The FDP will not include GP data

• The WMSDE will only allow approved researchers to access data. It will tightly control what they can see and what they can do with the data.  It will only allow data to be used for ethical, safe and transparent purposes with clearly described patient and public benefit. Patient and public contributors are central to the WMSDE. Importantly, patients and the public will be involved in the review of data access requests and the decision-making and data access approval processes through our Patient and Public Advisory Group and through our Data Trust Committee. Once approved, access and use of the data will be carefully managed by the NHS throughout, following the Five Safes framework – safe people, safe projects, safe settings, safe data, safe outputs

• The FDP will only allow access to patient data for people who need to see it as part of their role in the NHS

• Patients and the public will be able to opt out from the WMSDE through the national data opt-out service

• The national data opt-out service does not apply to the FDP