South Yorkshire residents will benefit from improved care services as a result of improved insight for decision making, following publication of a new system-wide data and insights strategy for health and social care.
Our new two-year data and insights strategy published today (Monday 5 August 2024), focuses on five areas to harness the data-driven transformation in health and care, creating a secure and privacy-preserving system that delivers for both people using health and care services and those working in them.
It means those using health and care services will see more personalised services and it will bring together more information in real-time to help those running services to ensure you are seen as quickly as possible.
Launching the strategy on behalf of the South Yorkshire Integrated Care System, Dr Kieran Baker, Chief Digital and Information Officer, NHS South Yorkshire said: “South Yorkshire is leading the way in how we want to use data and insights to improve people’s health and their experiences of services. We use data in so many ways and this strategy brings all those strands together for the first time in South Yorkshire.
We’re bringing together the expertise from across our organisations to scale up and share those skills. It will make us more efficient and innovative which will help the day to day running of services, but it’ll also help us be at the forefront of new research.
I’m really pleased that we’ve got an emphasis on marrying up the things people have told us matters to them with the other data we collect. We can build a richer picture and those insights really help influence day to day services as well as longer term plans.”
During Discovery Sessions held across South Yorkshire stakeholders, one colleague working in a local council said “I’d like to be able to link hospital discharge data and social care data, to help get people home quicker and improve their outcomes”.
Further, to give patients greater confidence than ever that their personal information is safe, secure data environments are being rolled out nationally for NHS and adult social care organisations to provide access to de-identified data for research. This means data linked to an individual will never leave a secure server and can only be used for agreed research purposes.
Dr Richard Cullen, Chief Clinical Information Officer, NHS South Yorkshire said: “Using patient data securely to better understand our population and their needs is essential for any high-quality health and social care system.
As a front line clinician every time I see a patient their health is being impacted by so many factors that the more insight we get into these the more effective my care will be, reducing the effect of ill health on that person and those people around that person. Allowing researchers access to date whether to analyse directly or to help run clinical trials will allow greater understanding of the causes and consequences of ill health and help the delivery of interventions and treatments that will give people better health..”