Organisational attendees

Understanding Patient Data
Information Commissioner’s Office
Department of Health and Social Care
Academy of Medical Royal Colleges
Royal College of General Practitioners
Healthwatch
Royal College of Surgeons
NHS Confederation
NHS England
Patients Association
Association of Medical Research Charities
British Medical Association
National Voices

Apologies received

UNISON
Nottingham University Hospitals Trust
Office of the National Data Guardian
NHS Frimley Integrated Care Board
Academy of Medical Royal Colleges

Open actions and decisions recorded

Meeting notes

Welcome and introductions 

The Chair welcomed all members to the call and noted any apologies.

Introductions of new members took place as well as noting any conflicts/declarations of interests.

Minutes and actions from previous meeting

The Check and Challenge members reviewed the minutes and actions from the last meetings on 13 December 2024. Members of the group provided feedback and advised on the need to ensure there is a balanced tone and making sure the challenge elements of questions raised is reflected.

The Chair took the group through the open actions.

Action: PMO Programme team to review 13 December Check and Challenge minutes in light of the feedback received.

NHS Federated Data Platform Programme update

The Assistant Director (PMO) Federated Data Platform and the Deputy Director (Service Integration) Federated Data Platform Programme provided an update on the programme.

The FDP Programme currently has 96 trusts signed up to the FDP as well as 36 systems. Delivery is going well with implementation and ‘go lives’ at a number of trusts over the last month. The Delivery team has been supporting trusts to implement the FDP through to benefits realisation before transition to business as usual. The programme is on track to achieve the target of 71 trusts by March 2025.

The FDP Demand and Delivery team is developing FDP offers within mental health and community area, with a number of workshops taking place over the next few weeks to start scoping and engaging with organsiations. There are a number of products in incubation and pilot stages, with the FDP Product team developing assurance processes and associated frameworks to support. Within training, there have been approximately 8,000 people who have accessed the FDP Centre of Excellence to use the wealth of training resources available.

The Assistant Director (PMO) Federated Data Platform recognised that there has been a large number of communications and media coverage on artificial intelligence (AI) recently. In regard to FDP, the programme is in the early stages of exploring how AI can enhance the future of healthcare within FDP. The programme is committed to developing explainable AI models in compliance with regulatory standards and best practices. Currently, there are no ‘live ‘products on the FDP that are using AI.

The Deputy Director (Service Integration) Federated Data Platform Programme provided an update on the FDP Solution Exchange. The FDP Solution Exchange has been updated to include 7-8 additional products that are in pilot or incubation stage. This enables organisations, who may be planning to develop or looking for tools, to view what is already in development and reach out to organisations to understand if the developing solution will suit their needs. This will help avoid duplication in development, as well as ensuring product development for the FDP is done within set processes, rigour, and guidance.

A member of the group asked how people can engage with the FDP to have their product tested. The Deputy Director (Service Integration) advised that there is a multi-layer approach to developing products via the FDP Solution Exchange. This may be via trusts who are wanting to develop products themselves, Innovation sites who are working in partnership with the FDP to focus on products aligned to National NHS England priorities, or third-party organisations. For third part organisations, discussions are taking place to understand how organisations with existing products in deployment can integrate with the FDP. There will be clear and robust criteria to this, including the need to ensure products are taken through various criteria reviews and processes such as the Information governance framework and Clinical assurance framework. There is an importance to ensure any product that is added to the Solution Exchange has gone through these processes, as well as demonstrated scalable values and benefits.

A member of the group asked how trusts are selected for incubation and pilot, and challenged whether there is equity of trusts trialling and testing across the country. The Deputy Director (Service Integration) advised that some trusts will have the capacity and capability to undertake product development, and others will be developing products as an innovation site focussing on products aligned to the national NHS England priorities. The FDP Programme tries to promote as much development across the country as possible. A key element in product development is even though a product is incubated in 1 trust, the process for product development ensures that, when piloted, the product is tested with representative trusts which may be across the country to demonstrate and test the scalability of that product. The FDP Programme has regional delivery managers who are in constant communication with trusts and help identify product development opportunities.

A member of the group queried if there was a sense of whether the FDP might be identified as a key impactful data set that will be requested to roll into the National Data Library. The FDP Senior Responsible Officer reminded the group that the FDP is a platform and not a data set. The FDP Senior Responsible Officer advised that there have been discussions with the National Data Library team on how to introduce health data, including discussions on areas such as ‘Open Safely’. The agreement and approach to the National Data Library will be measured and considered. The National Data Library team has been asked to provide further information, such as use cases of what the data would be used for and to understand the level of information required. An example case study for this is Death Data and the Department for Work and Pensions, both of which will hold information that is not owned by NHS England. The FDP Senior Responsible Officer agreed to share the use case list with the group as soon as it has been received.

The Chair noted the need to ensure communications, including public facing communications, is continued as this area of topic is likely to cause confusion. The FDP Senior Responsible Officer agreed and offered to bring back an agenda item to have a discussion on AI more generally, including the current exploration of large language models (LLM). The FDP Senior Responsible Officer clarified that any data used to train large language models within the FDP will only be done if there is a UK end point of that model and only if it uses the data we provide (not data from the web).

A member of the group asked for an update on the data use and access bill and how that could potentially impact the use of the FDP. The FDP Senior Responsible Officer advised that the bill will enforce data standard and API and so the focus is on data being more interoperable going into the FDP, but agreed to bring a more detailed update on this to the group. The Chair asked for this to be a regular item on the agenda going forward.

A member of the group asked who would need to be contacted to ensure anything created by AI/LLM has clear messaging to users that the data has been co-produced by an AI model, as this would be helpful for people to know in advance in the potential scenario of spotting any inaccuracies. The FDP Senior Responsible Officer advised that this element should be going into the Data Use and Access Bill but outlined that the query would be best to be directed to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) team.

The FDP Senior Responsible Officer reminded the group that although the focus of discussion so far has been the AI implication on FDP, AI is already in use in others area such as the use of co-pilot which is currently being used by clinicians.

A member of the group asked how often the FDP frequently asked questions are updated and asked if the group could see the types of questions being raised.

A member of the group outlined that they had been reading the FDP privacy notices and challenged the ability to be able to clearly see which products are live and which are not. The member of the group also questioned when the FDP DPIAs will be published and challenged the understanding that the plan was to publish these. The Assistant Director (PMO) advised that this was in development, but agreed to pick this up offline for a response from the FDP Information Governance Lead.

Action: FDP Senior Responsible Officer to share the list of National Data Library use cases once received from the National Data Library team.

Action: FDP Programme team to bring a future agenda item on artificial intelligence and how it is being considered for the FDP.

Action: FDP Senior Responsible Officer to bring updates on the Data Use and Access Bill. To be a regular agenda item going forward.

Action: FDP Programme team to send an update on the publication of FDP DPIAs.

Action: FDP Programme team to bring back to the group an overview of questions and statistics from the patient/public engagement portal.

FDP product demo – Timely Care Hub

The Digital Change Manager for the FDP at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust provided an overview and demonstration of the product to the group.

Timely Care Hub is an operational application which aims to improve the efficiency of expediting patients in the most efficient and effective way. The product enables care teams in hospitals to identify the actions they can take to ensure that patient care and discharge can be carried out smoothly and in the safest environment. This allows care teams to monitor the actions required and the care provided throughout a patient’s stay in hospital, ensuring all appropriate steps are taken to enable a timely discharge from hospital.

The Timely Care Hub product processes personal information about patients who are receiving care as an inpatient within hospital to ensure that patients are treated in the most effective and timely way. This includes information about a patient’s health, medical condition, and the speciality/ward they are receiving care.

The information presented is used and presented on screens in adult inpatient wards and are viewed and engaged with by multidisciplinary teams via this way.

Th product includes the ability for ‘writeback’. Writeback enables the ability to be able to put back into Cerner key details towards key discharge dates and will support the ability for information to be inputted in the correct time and correct way. This means that the product enables board rounds and criteria to reside rounds to run solely from the Timely Care Hub product, and information is then updated back into the source system.

The Digital Change Manager for the FDP at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust demonstrated the flow of the product information as well as sharing real instances of the product.

The Chair asked what has the impact been on staff satisfaction and staff morale. The Digital Change Manager for the FDP at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust provided an example of student nurses finding it helpful for them to triage their tasks along with timescales to help management. The Digital Change Manager for the FDP at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust has been beneficial to staff, but advised that the team is currently working closely with the FDP Benefits team to more formally report on these types of benefits of which can be brought back to a future Check and Challenge meeting.

A member of the group asked if the product has a feedback loop to develop digital modelling and if there have been considerations of digital training to help predict potential problems. The Digital Change Manager for the FDP at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust advised that they were unbale to answer the first question without technical team members in attendance, but advised that discussions have commenced on the opportunity to use this data to make predictive analyses of patients which come under similar cohorts. This is an ambition at this point, with discussions in early phases.

A member of the group queried whether the integration with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) has always been available or if it has been created in response to the FDP. The member of the group questioned whether there have been contractual discussions on the need to provide interoperability in order to deliver EHR services. The FDP Senior Responsible Officer advised that the addition of integration functionality of EHRs has been a long terms discussion and request with EHR suppliers and is part of the Data Use and Access Bill.

A member of the group drew parallels with general practice, with GP connect as an example, and reflected that data controller arrangements may make interoperability more straight forward from an IG point of view than the General Practice landscape.

The Deputy Director (Service Integration) provided further information on writeback. There are currently 4 ‘flavours’ of the writeback, for example, sometimes it is trusts, integration engines, or direct connections to the system itself. The FDP Programme are currently exploring with trusts the opportunities for writeback. This includes discussions with EPR suppliers to explore the integration potential. The challenge with this will be how to incentivise both trusts and suppliers.

A member of the group challenged the thinking on writeback and posed the question if writeback was to be agreed with the professional GP Connect, would the FDP Programme foresee information like discharge summaries/medicines changes to be sent straight to the GP record from EHR, or would it come from the FDP to general practice. The FDP Senior Responsible Officer advised that this example is too far in the future to provide comment on but outlined that this type of scenario is what the writeback piece of work will help clarify.

Action: Timely Care Hub benefits, particularly in relation to staff satisfaction and morale, to be brought back and shared with the Check and Challenge Group.

Action: FDP Programme team to share overview of benefits, particularly in relation to staff morale and satisfaction, for the Timely Care Hub product.

Any other business and close

The next meeting is due to take place on Friday 21 February 2025.

The chair thanked all for their attendance and closed the meeting.