NHS: Healthcare Data

Lord Suri Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Suri (Con)]

My Lords, this is a topic of great importance. I thank my noble colleagues who have succeeded in securing the time for this debate. I was very pleased to hear the remarkable speech by the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar. The maiden speech by my noble friend Lord Bethell was very encouraging; I am sure that he will live more than 110 years, having wished for only 100 years.

We are privileged to live in a golden age of medical innovation. New treatments are coming on to the market at an accelerating rate due to a number of new processes which are transforming surgery, pharmaceuticals, and care overall. Another area of great innovation is data. Big data has transformed the traditional working models of some industries and, when applied to datasets of sufficient scale, it can be exceedingly powerful at highlighting trends and suggesting changes. It therefore seems logical to see how the NHS could benefit.

Each year, the NHS collects terabytes of data on its patients. Those patients have a statutory opt-out, but we see that in practice most of them make the sensible decision to continue to grant access to their data so that processes can be improved going forward. This data is collected and processed, but the NHS has not started to use big data technologies on anything like the scale of other industries, such as logistics or shipping. Part of the reason for that is obvious—the NHS is not a tech company, and primarily deals with care and preventive medicine, but other barriers are more subtle. One area is privacy concerns. This data could cause great damage if it were to be stolen by the increasingly dangerous state-backed hackers of today. The solution is to invest in proper computer systems for the NHS, and to use all arms of the state to safeguard our data.

We must also make sure that important data is properly recorded. There are no reports on this, but I often see patients in hospitals filling in paper forms that are not obviously copied to an online portal. For repeated information I can see the reason why, but it would streamline processes to be able to auto-fill large parts of the form. Furthermore, that data is not easily accessible and will be expensive to find and send to patients. When new data protection laws and changing attitudes mean that people want better access to their data, this will have to change. Finally, the most recent NHS England data and datasets consultation confirmed and enhanced the recommendation of the Francis report:

“A coordinated collection of accurate information about the performance of organisations must be available to providers, commissioners, regulators and the public, in as near real time as possible”.


All nations now run their own healthcare, and increasingly city and regional mayors will have devolved health powers. This is a positive step. I have always supported devolution, for I think it leads to better decision-making, more experimentation and greater accountability. But different data collection protocols could result in incompatible datasets to which big data methods cannot be applied. Can the Minister say what plan the Department of Health has made to ensure that fragmentation of care delivery does not damage the ability of the health service to gather data at the national level?