Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has begun sharing four new data sources with the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record, covering appointments, encounters, location, and referral requests.
The addition of these four items means that Leeds Teaching is now sharing eight of the ten resources listed on its minimum viable data set, with diagnostic reports and medications to be added.
Sharing the news, Interweave highlighted the benefits of the expanded data for clinicians in accessing timely patient data, in supporting informed decision making, and in improving continuity of care.
“The increased data sharing strengthens the Yorkshire & Humber Care Record and contributes to more joined-up care for patients across the region, helping professionals to deliver better outcomes through improved information access,” Interweave adds.
Last summer, Leeds Teaching signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Arcturis, becoming part of Arcturis’ Real-World Data Network, a network providing real-time access to “diverse and enriched” health data representative of the UK population.
The network, approved by the Health Research Authority, brings together anonymised data including medications, lab tests, pathology reports, and clinical notes, along with other unstructured data, into disease specific datasets, which are then used to generate precision insights to inform drug development.
Paul Jones, CDIO at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, spoke of his team’s excitement around the partnership, adding: “By combining our clinical expertise with Arcturis’ data science and analytic capabilities, this partnership has the opportunity to accelerate the development of new therapies and improve patient outcomes.”
Wider trend: Health data
NHS England has published a contract worth an estimated £600,000, aiming to source an “evaluation partner” for the Federated Data Platform programme. According to the contract, the evaluation partner will be required to demonstrate the programme’s current and future impact, assessing whether it has achieved its objectives. The scope extends to capturing key learnings, and demonstrating value for money and accountability to its stakeholders, NHS England continues. An award decision is expected around the end of January 2026, with contract dates running from February 2026 to February 2029.
Great Ormond Street Hospital has unveiled a new platform designed to generate clinical intelligence from routine health data, developed in-house by its Data Research, Innovation and Virtual Environments unit. The trust highlights that whilst EPRs have enabled hospitals to capture a “huge amount” of information about patients and their conditions, “there is no consistent way to combine and analyse this data for broader clinical or operational insights”. In response, the Paediatric Informatics Consultation Using Real-world Evidence (PICTURE) platform was launched, supporting the aggregation and analysis of EPR data.
The co-founder of health data startup, Torch, has shared that the company has been acquired by OpenAI for a sum of “$100m+”. Outlining the mission to provide healthcare “for a billion people, for free”, Aoun says integrating that work into the AI used by billions every day “makes that dream a reality”. According to the Torch website, the startup is focused on connecting health data from a wide range of sources and offering answers to common health questions using AI.
