The joint project with the No 10 Data Science team, which kicked off earlier this year, sees the Yorkshire and Humber Secure Data Environment (SDE) and the No 10 Data Science team beginning an analysis of secure and anonymised patient data. It is looking at how the NHS patient referral system is supporting the management of demand on hospital services.
The aim is to use data from both GPs and hospitals, to build an evidence-based picture of how the referral process for specialist care operates in practice – tracing patient journeys from initial referral request, through subsequent healthcare contacts – in order to inform policy development and ultimately improve patient experience.
The Yorkshire and Humber SDE, a secure NHS data storage and access system, was able to support the request from the No 10 data science team due to its unique ability to truly link data from a number of areas.
The data will initially be coming from the Connected Bradford data base, a core part of the SDE, which includes anonymised data from people within the Bradford and some surrounding areas. Connected Bradford is the only research database in England that provides linkage between GP data and data within hospital electronic health record systems.
It includes more than 40 years of information from 1.4m individual patients, created by linking data from primary and secondary care, along with data provided by others relating to education, housing and air quality.
The No 10 Data Science Team and the Connected Bradford team are now working together to produce some early findings from analysing the data, within the next few months.
John Birkinshaw, West Yorkshire Operational Lead for YHSDE and Research Data Infrastructure Manager for Connected Bradford, said: “We are thrilled to be able to support this request and look forward to working with other customers in the future as we continue to build on our unique, secure data sets to help with progress.
“Information is key to change and improvements, and we have years of collected data here at the SDE which can be stored, pseudonymised and analysed safely. Our Yorkshire and Humber SDE team is enjoying working with fellow data scientists to make sure our data is used to help drive improvements for the public, both locally and nationally.”