Some estimates suggest the NHS is the sixth largest employer in the world, just behind Walmart and Amazon.  

Naturally, any employer of this size will be trading in an incomprehensible amount of data. But with the NHS currently focused on better patient outcomes,  financial impact, and recovery - what matters, is how that data is used to unlock opportunities and achieve the organizations objectives, cost effectively. 

There were over 1.6 million patient interactions with NHS services per day according to the figures from 2021/2022. And, according to data from the World Economic Forum, each year, hospitals are producing 50 petabytes of data. Yet just 3% of hospitals make use of this data. That leaves 97% of this data unused. 

This means that there are plentiful untold opportunities for unlocking clinical and operational breakthroughs that can change patient outcomes and improve operational and financial efficiency. Unlocking the power of data is key to any organization’s success – and this is especially true for healthcare. 

The good news is that the UK government recognizes the transformative potential of digital technology - with the chancellor having unlocked £3.4 billion of new investment in NHS digitisation in the spring budget (a portion of which will be used to expand the use of AI for quicker cancer diagnosis) - embedding a strong data and analytics strategy within the healthcare sector is no easy feat.

A successful approach to data and analytics application will be one that isn’t just focused on new technology adoption – but that is focused on achieving, operational, financial and patient-led outcomes. But what does this look like?

Using entity resolution for a 360 view of your data

One project currently underway to support the NHS in securely analysing data at an unprecedented scale, is the UK government’s Federated Data Platform. 

It’s a unique opportunity to help the NHS create an accurate, fast, open and secure data platform with a 360 view of patient records. I believe that leveraging the efficiency and innovation of technology leaders in healthcare can support the sector in reaching underserved communities – by using advanced technology to improve the focus on proactive, preventative and individualized care – that puts patients in control of their own care too. 

The perennial challenge for NHS Trusts is connecting disparate data siloes together to create a “Patient 360” concept. 

This is where Decision Intelligence (DI) comes in which allows organizations to unify data, create context from that data, and augment and automate decision making for actionable insights. Applying Entity Resolution technology to this challenge is critical in helping us to do this, because it aims to provide a comprehensive, holistic view of a patients’ health by aggregating and integrating data from various sources. Providing a complete, unified, and secure profile of an individual patient that includes their medical history, clinical data, lab results, medication records and much more is vital in improving clinical decision making, enhancing care coordination, providing personalized medicine and leveraging analytics and insights. 

Most importantly, it helps to empower patient engagement so that each of us can actively participate in our care decisions and the management of our own health.  Entity Resolution technology plays a significant role by gaining insights from 360-degree longitudinal patient records enhanced with accurately linked social determinants of health data, helping target vital resources to better support the highest at-risk people with complex health and social care needs.

Digital transformation efforts right now need to focus on creating automated workflows, allowing more integrated ways of working, using high quality data and analytics to reduce the backlog and support better patient outcomes. 

Data for better patient outcomes

To give an example of this in action, it was recently announced that the University of Liverpool’s Civic Health Innovation Labs (CHIL) and partners, will use a £4.9 million award from the Office for Life Sciences (OLS) to make better, quicker decisions from Integrated Care System data. 

Working with our partners on this project, we’re able to improve care by making contextual data more accessible to providers and patients. 

In essence, we’re building a trusted data foundation to develop better drug and digital therapies, as well as to better co-ordinate care services to tackle global challenges in mental health, including increasing levels of illness. And this is just one example of what is possible when there is a trusted data foundation in place. 

Ultimately the NHS’ data challenge isn’t one that’s going to be solved overnight. The solution to better data management is complex. We need to undergo a major data-led modernisation programme – that like with the University of Liverpool’s work – better connects the NHS’ wealth of data and puts it to work, driving operational efficiency and better health outcomes for patients.   CEO and Founder of Quantexa, Vishal Marria