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NHS to build on power of data used to save lives during
the pandemic
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NHS patient data enabled world-first COVID-19 treatment
saving one million lives
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Draft strategy to set out new patient rights to access
their health records
Millions of patients are set to benefit from a revolutionary use
of technology and life-saving lessons learned during the global
coronavirus pandemic, as a new draft data strategy will be
published next week ahead of public and stakeholder consultation.
Over the last 18 months, data has saved lives and helped ensure
the NHS could provide better care to people suffering from
COVID-19 and other health issues. This ensured doctors and nurses
could deliver innovative support in the most effective and
efficient way.
By empowering frontline staff to share data for patient care in a
secure way that preserves privacy, ground-breaking clinical
trials were approved in record time and new services to care for
people in their own homes were set up via remote digital
monitoring, avoiding lengthy hospital stays.
This enabled rapid research into COVID-19 treatments such as
dexamethasone, which has saved over one million lives across the
world. By rapidly speeding up the process to grant approvals for
trials to get underway – which previously have taken around 100
days - and giving researchers access to data in a safe and secure
way, this world-leading trial led to the discovery of the first
proven treatment to reduce coronavirus mortality.
The proposed strategy will ensure people are able to view their
medical records, and empower them to keep a track of their health
information.
Health and Social Care Secretary said:
“Data saves lives. We need to learn from the pandemic to improve
the way our health and care system processes data, giving power
to patients and enabling clinicians to use data in new ways to
improve patient care and support research for innovative
treatments.
“This pandemic has shown us just how many lives can be saved
through effective use of data - we must do all we can to harness
this potential and the changes brought about through this
strategy will no doubt go on to save countless more lives in the
future.”
The strategy will promote innovation such as Robotic Process
Automation (RPA), which looks at using bots to automate back
office processes, saving the NHS more than half a million hours a
year in staff time by 2025.
The Data Strategy also includes proposals to make the UK a leader
in innovation-friendly regulation of AI technologies, developing
unified standards for the efficacy and safety testing of AI
solutions and streamlining the path to market AI technologies.
Trials being supported include those which aim to replace the
need for two radiologists to review breast cancer scans by
instead using one radiologist and the AI, making the process
faster and more efficient.
Looking to the future, the draft data strategy seeks to learn the
lessons of the pandemic so the health and social care sectors can
use data to design and deliver better services for the public and
improve care when we are not in a pandemic situation.
Martin Landray, Professor of medicine and epidemiology at
the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of
Oxford and the clinical trials lead at Health Data Research UK,
said:
“Within 100 days, the RECOVERY trial found that a low-dose
steroid treatment called dexamethasone reduced the risk of death
by a third for patients on ventilators. It was the world’s first
coronavirus treatment proven to save lives. Estimates are that it
may have saved many hundreds of thousands of lives.
“Pre-COVID, it would have taken 100 days to even get permission
to go ahead with the trial. We cannot go back. It is a challenge,
but one we have to take on, because the future of all of our care
depends on robust knowledge on whether treatments work or do not
work.”
