NHS England and Improvement and NHSX have teamed up with tech giants to consolidate key data sets to inform COVID-19 decision making.
The group is to develop a data platform and dashboard that will provide organisations with secure, reliable and timely data to make informed, effective decisions.
The data will include current occupancy levels at hospitals, broken down by general beds, specialist and critical care beds, current capacity of A&E departments and current waiting times and statistics about the lengths of stay for COVID-19 patients. It means organisations can see data at a national level and also down to individual hospitals.
It will include NHS 111 data and COVID-19 test result data from Public Health England to support decision makers understand how the virus is spreading locally, and proactively manage any hotspots. This will mean that equipment is supplied to facilities with the greatness need and demand.
A beta form of the dashboard will be available in the next few days.
The data will be cleaned, anonymised and packaged into a single dashboard to support organisations with real-time metrics needed to track and understand the current spread of the crisis, and the capacity in the healthcare system to deal with it. Once the public health emergency has ended the data will be destroyed or returned.
Levels of staff sickness and what ventilators being used where will also be included.
The team is being led by Indra Joshi, Director of AI, NHSX and Ming Tang, Director of Data/Analytics, NHS England/Improvement.
The tech companies involved include:
- Microsoft: is supporting NHSX and NHS England’s technical teams, who have built a backend data store on Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, to bring multiple data sources into a single, secure location. A G-cloud data processing contract is in place
- Palantir Technologies UK: is providing the software, Palantir Foundry, that powers the front end data platform. Palantir Foundry, which has been primarily developed in the UK, enables disparate data to be integrated, cleaned, and harmonised in order to develop the single source of truth that will support decision-making. Foundry is built to protect data by design. A G-cloud data processing contract is in place. Palantir is a data processor, not a data controller, and cannot pass on or use the data for any wider purpose without the permission of NHS England
- Faculty: is a London-based AI technology specialist that has an existing partnership with NHSX and is now supporting the development and execution of the data response strategy. This includes developing dashboards, models and simulations to provide key central government decision-makers with a deeper level of information about the current and future coronavirus situation to help inform the response
- Google: the NHS is exploring the use of tools in the G Suite family to allow the NHS to collect critical real-time information on hospital responses to COVID-19. Data collected would be aggregated operational data only such as hospital occupancy levels and A&E capacity. It will not include any form of identifiable patient data
