Joining up and sharing health and care data

When we are at our most vulnerable, providing authorised health and care professionals with access to our records allows them to understand our needs and make the best decisions with us, and for us.

We want to ensure data is collected consistently and made available across local areas to support joined up and safer care on a day to day basis.

That is why NHS England invested in a number of shared care records that will enable the safe and secure sharing of an individual’s health and care information as they move between different parts of the NHS and social care. Based on the previous local health and care record exemplar programmes, these were designed to support local areas already adopting best practice in the collection, protection and ethical use of health and care data to go further, faster and encourage others to follow swiftly in their footsteps.

At the same time, we are working to make sure that data can flow seamlessly between different IT systems across health and care settings. Find out more about our system-wide move towards interoperability.

Sharing records

Data can save lives, so the NHS is working to better join it up across local areas.  Watch this video for more information.

 

Developments in technology mean your records can be combined in a safe, secure way, and made available in one place. Making this work requires agreed standards that allow different systems to connect with each other (we call this interoperability) and agreements on how to share data between organisations.

Find out more about shared care records.