National and local leaders

The insights and analysis drawn from data are vital for leaders to plan, commission and improve their services.

We want to reshape our systems and platforms into smaller discrete services by creating platforms that can talk to each other and work together, and so can easily be used to access data. This will avoid delays in diagnosis, prevent tests from being repeated unnecessarily, and get members of the public the treatment and care that they need.

Our vision: leaders and policymakers in every community will have up-to-date sophisticated data to make effective decisions and help the health and care system run at its best. We will ensure the data architecture underpinning the health and care system can easily work together to make more effective and efficient use of data.

As a national decision maker, I will have:

• information about the operation of health and adult social care organisations to:
• support them by planning national programmes, and targeting areas that need support, intervening where there are serious failings
• spot emerging risks and issues, and respond to national emergencies such as COVID-19
• manage population health and proactive care by understanding current health and care needs and predicting future ones
• commission specialised services
• data to develop national policy and produce guidance and standards, improvement, and regulation

As a local decision maker, I will have:

• data about our current service delivery and our local population to:
• take a population health and proactive care approach, with interventions and resources targeted at those people and groups who most need them
• plan, commission, oversee and improve services to suit local needs, including areas that need support or improvement
• evaluate services and care, including capacity and demand, safety risks and good practice
• manage vital management functions such as workforce planning

Key commitments to achieve this include:

• the development of a federated data platform that will provide the connectivity needed to transform care and improve outcomes for patients (April 2023)
• the introduction of a statutory power to enable health and adult social care public bodies to require anonymous information that relates to the provision of health and adult social care services in England (delivery date subject to Parliamentary processes)
• the development of an easily accessible data-sharing solution with local authorities and providers over the next three years that supports real-time decision making at local, regional and national levels, building on the learning from the pandemic, and seek to ensure different actors in the system have access to the same rich data sets (commenced June 2022)
• to work with local health and care systems and partners including integrated care systems, including co-designing regional engagement, to make sure that we understand the needs, concerns and opportunities for different communities across England (commenced from April 2022)
• the assurance that all commitments are assessed against their impacts on improving understanding of and ability to act on tackling health disparities and ill-health (commenced June 2022)
• the creation of at-scale datasets that bring together the different types of health data to develop new tools for prevention, diagnostics and clinical decision-support through the Data for Research and Development programme (by December 2023).