Northamptonshire hospitals are first to transition to local instance of FDP

Kettering General Hospital and Northampton General Hospital have become the first of 44 pilot sites to transition to a local instance of the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP).

The FDP enables the hospitals, which form the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire (UHN) NHS Group, to bring together information from different clinical and HR systems in a single place, giving staff a live view of information.

There are 44 pilot sites planned to transition to local instances of the NHS FDP before July 2024.

Rebecca Taylor, director of transformation and quality improvement at UHN, told Digital Health News: “Through the pilot, we are already realising the benefits of having a real-time, simple view of the relevant data to support decision making, and this transition will help us to introduce even more improvements as a result.

“Having access to increased functionality and products on the platform means we can build our own dashboards and reports, and ultimately this will result in increasing productivity which will reduce waiting times for patients.”

Vin Diwakar, national director for transformation at NHS England, told Digital Health News: “The transition of national and local products to the NHS FDP is officially underway and has the potential to transform healthcare by connecting the data we hold and harnessing it to deliver the best possible coordinated care for our patients.”

A spokesperson for UHN told Digital Health News that the FDP is supporting its theatre productivity programme by bringing together upcoming theatre sessions alongside patient waiting lists and staff rosters in one view, enabling surgery lists to be scheduled more effectively.

NHS England told Digital Health News that there will be “a gradual and managed transition” of pilot sites so that it can “support users”.

In an NHS FDP privacy notice, NHS England said that the FDP will be implemented in phases between March 2024 and March 2027, with the initial ‘transition phase’ taking place between March 2024 and May 2024.

This will be followed by a ‘delivery phase’, expected to run from May 2024 to March 2027, which will see the FDP rolled out more widely and use of transparency and privacy enhancing technology (PET) to process personal data to de-identify it and to replace legacy NHS de-identification solutions.

The NHS FDP is made up of a number of separate independent data platforms, each of which is called an ‘instance’ alongside PET.

Instances operated by NHSE and are called ‘national instances’, whereas instances operated by an NHS trust or an integrated care board (ICB) are known as “local instances”.

Products currently available on the National Data Platform, such as the ambulance dataset dashboard, the COVID monitoring and publication dashboard and the antimicrobial resistance dashboard, are transitioning to the national instance FDP.

In April 2024, NHSE awarded an £8.5 million contract to consultancy firm KPMG to “promote the adoption” of the FDP by trusts and ICBs.

NHSE initially published a heavily redacted contract with Palantir to run the FDP in December 2023, however a more up to date version has since been published in March this year.