Lords committee questions head of NHSX about healthcare data to assist older people

The inquiry has heard about the importance of healthcare data for a range of purposes, including diagnosing illnesses, providing tailored care to patients, and conducting medical research.  The Committee will ask the Head of NHSX and officials from NHS Digital how the NHS uses the vast amount of data that it gathers, in order to plan healthcare services.  The Committee will also hear from the National Data Guardian about the safeguards that govern the use of this patient data.
 
The evidence session will begin at 10.20am in Committee Room 2 of the House of Lords. The witnesses will include:

• Dame Fiona Caldicott, National Data Guardian;
• Matthew Gould, CEO, NHSX;
• Chris Roebuck, Chief Statistician, NHS Digital; and
• Dr Jem Rashbass, Executive Director of Master Registries and Data, NHS Digital

In the second session, the Committee will then hear from academics about how they access data for research studies, and from representatives of the data industry about the benefits and challenges of combining datasets from the public and private sectors.
 
The evidence session will begin at 11.25am in Committee Room 2 of the House of Lords. The witnesses will include:

• Charles Lowe, CEO, Digital Health and Care Alliance;
• Professor Julian Peto, Professor of Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine;
• Dr Paola Zaninotto, Associate Professor in Medical Statistics, UCL; and
• Dr Jeni Tennison, CEO, Open Data Institute.

Questions likely to be asked include:

• How is healthcare data currently used within the NHS, particularly for planning and designing services for an ageing population, and diagnosis and prevention of age-related diseases?
• To what extent is healthcare data from the NHS shared outside the NHS, and what are the challenges associated with this?
• How much integration is there between health data collected by private organisations (e.g. data from medical monitoring devices and from commercial wearables) and data collected in the NHS?
• How much control do patients have over the use of their data?
• Is there a gap between expectations of what data could achieve, and what is possible in reality?