NHS England recently announced its new initiative to use data and its insights more effectively to deliver services across health and social care settings – the Federated Data Platform (FDP). The platform will provide tools and dashboards of information in real-time to meet the needs of health and care professionals to improve care.

The idea for a federated data platform to support transformation of health and care services was born during the pandemic. NHS England’s data store allowed it to track COVID-19 trends, monitor the spread of the virus and deploy services where they were needed most. Integrated data was crucial to the successful vaccine roll-out, for example. Here, it helped ensure that every party delivering different elements of the vaccine had the right information at the right time. The plan now is to make this integrated use of data routine, as part of the NHS strategy to digitise, connect and transform health and care.

By providing frontline health and care professionals with the most essential real-time data insights and intelligence, the platform will support population health management, care coordination within ICSs, elective recovery in trusts, vaccination and immunisation management, and logistics. It will serve as a vital tool in recovering from the backlog and delivering more preventive care, making a shift to actively drawing on data to direct services and care. Use of the FDP will help increase transparency and patient understanding of how data can be used to improve their outcomes.

Ming Tang, National Director for Data and Analytics at NHS England and NHS Improvement Data Integration, said: “The Federated Data Platform is an operational tool that helps connect systems together and support better workflow. For instance, if you think about the current pathway of the patient going to hospital to be assigned a care home, there is a lot of information that gets passed in the system between different settings, which is not always consistent and up-to-date. This is an example of an issue that the platform is aiming to solve.”

The purpose of the FDP strongly aligns with the PRSB’s mission to help ensure that the right health and care staff have access to the right information at the right time, to make the best decisions about a person’s care. Implementation of PRSB standards will ensure the data being put into the system will be as robust as possible, and we are working with NHS England to consider how we can contribute to this project. We’ve also received several expressions of interest from our members to learn more about how they can get involved and support the initiative. If you’re a PRSB member and would like to register your interest in the programme, please contact info@theprsb.org.