Making the best use of health data
In collaboration with Health Innovation East, Cambridge University Health Partners is leading the programme to create the East of England’s Secure Data Environment (SDE), a project that we believe is as important as new buildings in modernising NHS healthcare. The SDE allows the NHS to mobilise one of its most valuable assets, data, whilst enabling researchers to speed up the search for new treatments for some of our biggest killers, including heart disease.
The Eastern SDE will allow approved researchers to access data from up to 7m people, securely, from 22 NHS trusts, 659 GP practices, 11 local authorities, 6 integrated care systems and 3 medical schools. The idea is unique in that it doesn’t allow scientists to take information away for analysis, instead they are only granted tightly controlled access to agreed data, which stays under NHS control.
Medical research is a numbers game. The more people researchers look at, the greater their chances of spotting patterns and clues to the causes some of our most lethal conditions and diseases. Using existing data more effectively will make the NHS more productive.
Our first project is to try to establish why a fifth of people with heart failure end up back in hospital a month after being discharged.
Heart failure is a major focus in the East of England
CVD is one of the areas of greatest addressable disease burden in the region. There are significant inequalities in outcomes and access to care. It has been identified as a priority within each ICS’s strategy.
Many heart failure readmissions could be prevented
In-hospital survival rates for heart failure are 90% but around 20% are re-admitted within 30 days. Development of a risk assessment tool, and validation in clinical practice, could help to avoid readmission through improved clinical decision-making and outcomes.
The SDE can add maximum value in this area
There are a range of current and potential research programmes locally which could be accelerated. Data to enable this work is not available nationally.
