Faster Data Flows (FDF)

To accelerate recovery of elective waiting lists and waiting times, and to deliver the best quality care and outcomes for patients, there is a need for timely, highly quality data that can be accessed and owned throughout the whole national to local delivery chain and across the whole patient pathway (Primary Care through to Discharge). 

There is a need to support elective recovery and individual care coordination which the ICBs are accountable for, whilst reducing the data collection burden on providers. 

This will be achieved through the implementation of daily data flows into a product that supports the ability to link data sets and provide tools back to providers and accountable organisations. 

The new daily collection will include identifiable patient level activity about admissions, inpatient care, discharges and outpatient appointments from acute trusts in England. Anonymous data will be shared back with trusts via a dashboard, allowing them to identify issues that could be adversely affecting the recovery programme such as bed blocking, increases to delayed transfers of care, delays with diagnosis and bottlenecks with outpatient care. 

Whilst similar data is already collected weekly and monthly from trusts, it is only disseminated back to commissioners on a monthly basis and there is often a two-month delay, meaning there is too much of a delay in between the data being collected and being shared with the commissioners to make it useful for operational decision making.

Deliverables:

• implementing a new innovative daily collection of core data items
• utilise functionality within the NHS Data Platform to collect data and provide outputs
• reduce the reporting burden on providers by scaling down the current daily SITREPS
• establish the foundations to build more efficient and effective data collections to support operations and planning across the system
• provide tools/dashboards to support collaborative working for local care planning

The data will be collected using an NHS Digital instance of Palantir’s Foundry platform.  Neither NHS England nor Palantir will have access to the identifiable data collected.

View the Faster Data Flows Transparency Notice.