NHS England » National Identifiable Data Collection Dashboard

Product Description

The National Identifiable Data Collection Dashboard is designed to collect daily patient data from community care settings (providers). To achieve this, NHS England and providers are using the Federated Data Platform, which will feed data from providers to the NHS England Arden and Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit (AGEM CSU). The National Identifiable Data Dashboard for Acute Illness Cases focuses on admissions, inpatient care, discharge, and outpatient activities in community settings.

The data will be used to support and accelerate the recovery of choice waiting lists and waiting times and is in line with NHS England’s choice recovery plan published in February 2022, which aims to transform services by harnessing the power of data and technology. NHS England has committed £2.1 billion to modernize digital technology and increase the frequency and use of data to change the way care is delivered. NHS England wants to focus on areas that use data to make clinical and operational decisions better, while freeing up clinical time and reducing barriers to collaboration.

The data will support all stakeholders by providing a range of benchmarking opportunities to improve patient care and help identify best practices to drive organizational and clinical improvements as well as gaps in service delivery and accelerate the recovery of waiting lists and wait times. . This will also support more efficient commissioning of services to support continued patient care using the most appropriate care.

Specifically, the dashboards will:

• elective recovery support – Having daily community contact data will allow the ICB and NHSE to see the number of patients attending community appointments each day. It will also provide the ICB and NHSE with daily queue time data, allowing for faster reporting of system capacity and load, allowing for a faster and more collaborative response. Greater availability of this data will help the ICB and NHSE improve support for planned recovery across the system.
• support unplanned care options – Having data on daily admissions, inpatients and discharges will allow the ICB and NHSE to see the number of patients admitted and/or discharged daily. This will help the ICB liaise with service providers (e.g. primary care, acute care providers, mental health providers, ambulance trusts) to ensure that activities are as balanced as possible across the system. It will support trusts in managing capacity and demand on an hourly and daily basis.

Care coordination – Daily automated flow of detailed data will improve patient flow and care coordination by providing more timely data. This will enable NHSE to guide the delivery and management of health services in England across primary, secondary, community and mental health care functions, for example by identifying blockages and providing support to resolve them. For example, if a children’s charity were to run a campaign to raise awareness of ADHD in children that NHSE was not aware of, this would lead to an increase in requests for ADHD diagnosis and therefore an unplanned increase in waiting times. Having this data available more quickly and nationally will enable decisions such as using capacity outside the region and moving resources to manage these waitlists.

What are the purposes for processing my personal data in this Product?

This Product processes personal information (called “personal data” under data protection laws) about hospital admissions and discharges. Daily collections from local health care providers will proactively identify problems such as increased wait times for hospitalization or delays in patient discharge from the hospital. This will lead to faster and more effective operational solutions to address and support the emerging crisis associated with increasing wait times for elective care, such as quickly responding to increased local demand through efficient use of resources. The data will also be used to improve the performance of the NHS by measuring performance consistently and working across regions and systems to understand and address the causes of performance differences.

Processes are implemented, which means that you cannot be directly identified from the data in the dashboard. This is because all identifiers such as your name, NHS number, full address and full date of birth have been removed from the data used. This is called de-identification. NHS England will de-identify your data before passing it on to the FDP. Anonymized data is processed to create the Product.

What personal data about me is processed in this Product?

Personal data that has been anonymised (we call this pseudonymised data) will be processed by NHS England for the above purposes in relation to patients who have been hospitalized or admitted to hospital. The data that is initially processed to create the Product and to create the anonymized data displayed on dashboards may include patient data:

• National Health Service number
• Date of birth
• postcode of their usual home address
• information about their admission, hospital stay and discharge from hospital, as well as any outpatient appointments and visits

Patient level identifying data will be collected daily by NHS England AGEM CSU. Data will be collected using a secure instance of NHS England’s Palantir Federal Data Platform (FDP). Palantir will act as a data processor, however Palantir teams will not have access to the identifiable data collected as it is managed only by the NHS England AGEM CSU team.

To whom is my personal data transferred?

NHS England will not share any personal data that has been processed as part of the National Identifiable Data Dashboard. Before data is made available, it will be anonymized to ensure that individuals in the data cannot be identified.

Any request from these organizations to access record level data must be submitted/claimed through the NHS England Data Access Request Service (DARS) and enter into a data sharing agreement. The DARS processes involve NHS England obtaining independent advice from the Advisory Group on Data (AGD) where appropriate. Find out more about the role of AGD.

UK GDPR Information

Controllers of your personal data

Under data protection law, NHS England is the legal controller of your personal data.

Legal grounds for processing your personal data

The processing of anonymized personal data by the National Health Service in England for the purposes described above is permitted on the following legal bases under data protection law (this is the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018)):

• Legal obligation – Article 6(1)(c) … ‘processing is necessary to comply with a legal obligation.” This applies where section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 requires NHS England to collect and analyze personal data for the purpose of creating dashboards.
• Substantial public interest – Article 9(2)(g)’processing is necessary for reasons of significant public interest‘ together with the legal basis in Schedule 1, Part 2, Paragraph 6 of the Data Protection Act 2018 (“DPA 2018)) “statutory, etc. and state goals” This applies where NHS England processes anonymised personal data in accordance with the legal obligations set out above;

Processor acting on behalf of NHS England

Data platform contractor Palantir Technologies UK Ltd is a processor acting on behalf of the National Health Service in England. They provide the data platform and technology that the Product uses and only act in accordance with NHS England’s instructions for processing anonymised data, storing it and making it available to NHS England on the Product platform.

Your rights under UK GDPR

Under the UK GDPR, you have the following rights in relation to the processing of your personal data by the English National Health Service for the above purposes:

• right to be informed
• right of access
• right to correction

Further information about these rights can be found in the NHS Federal Data Platform Privacy Notice.

You can contact NHS England’s Data Protection Officer at [email protected].

Does a national data waiver or other waiver apply to this Product?

The national data waiver does not apply to NHS England’s processing of anonymised personal data in this Product. This is because NHS England is obliged and has a legal obligation under the De-identification and Analytics Directives 2023 to process the data that is used to create the dashboards.

For more information about when the national opt-out does not apply, see When your choice to share data from your health records does not apply – NHS (www.nhs.uk).

The Type 1 waiver does not apply to this Product because this Product does not use confidential patient information obtained from a practice.

Additional information

For more information about how personal data is processed on the Federated Data Platform, please see the NHS Federated Data Platform Privacy Notice.