Product description

The National Identifiable Data Collections Instance Acute Dashboard aims to create daily collections of patient data from community care settings (the Providers). To do this, NHS England and the Providers are using The Federated Data Platform, which will pull data into the NHS England Arden and Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit (AGEM CSU) from the Providers. The National Identifiable Data Collections Instance Acute Dashboard is targeting admission, inpatient, discharge and outpatient activity in community settings.

The data will be used to support and accelerate the recovery of elective waiting lists and waiting times and is aligned with NHS England elective recovery plan published in February 2022 which aims to transform services by harnessing the potential of data and technology. NHS England has committed £2.1 billion to modernise digital technology and improve the frequency and use of the data to redesign care pathways. NHS England want to focus on areas that use data to drive better clinical and operational decision making and in doing so free up clinical time and reduce barriers to collaborative working.

The data will support all stakeholders by providing a number of benchmarking opportunities to improve efficacy of patient care and will help to identify best practice to drive organisational and clinical improvement as well as gaps in service provision and to accelerate recovery of elective waiting lists and waiting times. It will also support better commissioning of services to support patients’ onward care with the most appropriate care.

Specifically the dashboards will:

• support elective recovery – the availability of daily community contact data will enable ICBs and NHSE to see the volume of patients attending community appointments on a daily basis. Additionally this will provide ICBs and NHSE with daily data on waiting list times enabling system capacity and pressure to be reported in a faster way, enabling a more rapid, joined up response. Having this data more readily available will support ICBs and NHSE to better support elective recovery across the system
• support non-elective care capacity – the availability of daily community admission, inpatient and discharge data will enable ICBs and NHSE to see the volume of patients being admitted and/or discharged on a daily basis. This will support ICBs when liaising with service providers (e.g. primary care, acute providers, mental health providers, ambulance trusts), to ensure activity is as balanced across the system as possible. It will support Trusts with managing capacity and demand by hour and day

Care Coordination – The daily, automated granular data flow will improve patient flow and care coordination by providing more timely data. This will enable NHSE to manage the provision and management of health services in England across functions in primary care, secondary care, community and mental health services, for example by identifying blockages and supporting with resolution. For instance, if a children’s charity ran a campaign to raise awareness for ADHD in children that NHSE was unaware of, this would lead to an increase in requests for an ADHD diagnosis and therefore an unplanned increase in waiting times. Having this data available faster and at a national level would allow for decisions to be made, such as using out of region capacity and moving resource to manage these waiting lists.

What are the purposes for processing my personal data in this Product?

This Product processes personal information (called ‘personal data’ under data protection laws) about patients’ admission and discharge from hospital. The daily collections from community care providers will allow for early identification of issues such as an increase in waiting times to be admitted, or delays in patients being discharged from hospital. This will result in faster and more efficient operational decisions to resolve issues and support the emerging crisis of increasing waiting times for elective care, such as responding quickly to increased localised demand by making effective use of resources. The data will also be used to drive improvement within the NHS, through using consistent measurement of performance and working across regions and systems to understand and address the reasons behind performance variation.

Processes are implemented which means that you can’t be directly identified from the data in the dashboard. This is because all identifiers such as your name, NHS number, full address and full date of birth have been removed from the data which is used. This is called de-identification. Your data is de-identified by NHS England before it is transferred into FDP. The de-identified data is processed to create the Product.

What personal data about me is processed in this Product?

Personal data which has been de-identified (we call this Pseudonymised data) will be processed by NHS England for the purposes above about patients who have been or are admitted to a hospital. The data which is initially processed to create the Product and to create the de-identified data which is shown in the dashboards may include data about a patient’s:

• NHS number
• date of birth
• postcode of their usual home address
• information about their admission, inpatient stay and discharge from hospital plus any outpatient appointments and visits

Patient level identifiable data will be collected daily by NHS England AGEM CSU. The data will be collected using a secure NHS England instance of Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP). Palantir will act as a data processor however Palantir teams will not have access to the identifiable data collected as this is managed only by the NHS England AGEM CSU team.

Who is my personal data shared with?

NHS England will not share any personal data that has been processed as part of the National Identifiable Data Collections Instance Acute Dashboard. Before making data available, it will be de-identified to ensure individuals cannot be identified within the data.

Any request by these organisations for access to the record level data must be submitted/ applied for through NHS England’s Data Access Request Service (DARS), and enter into a Data Sharing Agreement. DARS processes include NHS England receiving independent advice from the Advisory Group for Data (AGD) where appropriate. Learn more about the role of AGD.

UK GDPR Information

Controllers of your personal data

Under data protection law NHS England are the legal controllers of your personal data.

Legal grounds for processing your personal data

The processing of de-identified personal data by NHS England for the purposes explained above is permitted under the following legal grounds under data protection law (this is UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018)):

• Legal Obligation – Article 6(1)(c) … ‘the processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation’. This applies where NHS England is directed under section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to collect and analyse personal data for the purpose of producing the dashboards.
• Substantial Public Interest – Article 9(2)(g) ‘processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest’ together with the legal ground in Schedule 1, Part 2, Paragraph 6 of the Data Protection Act 2018 (“DPA 2018”) “statutory etc and government purposes”. This applies where NHS England processes de-identified personal data under Legal Obligation above;

Processor acting on behalf of NHS England

The data platform contractor, Palantir Technologies UK Ltd is a processor acting on behalf of NHS England. They provide the data platform and the technology that the Product uses and only act on the instructions of NHS England to process the de-identified data, to store it and make it available to NHS England in the platform for the Product.

Your rights under UK GDPR

You have the following rights under UK GDPR in relation to the processing of your personal data by NHS England for the purposes above:

• right to be informed
• right of access
• right to rectify

Further information about these rights is in the NHS Federated Data Platform Privacy Notice.

You can contact NHS England’s data protection officer at england.dpo@nhs.net.

Does the National Data Opt Out or any other opt out apply to this Product?

The National Data Opt Out does not apply to the processing of de-identified personal data by NHS England in this Product. This is because NHS England is required and has a legal obligation under the De-Identification and Analytical Directions 2023 to process the data which is used to create the dashboards.

More information about when the National Data Opt Out does not apply is available at When your choice about sharing data from your health records does not apply – NHS (www.nhs.uk)

Type One Opt Outs do not apply to this Product as no confidential patient information obtained from GP Practices is used in this Product.

More information

For more information about how personal data is processed within the Federated Data Platform please see the NHS Federated Data Platform Privacy Notice.