Technical Infrastructure
The model for creating a Learning Healthcare System for the North West Coast Connected Health Cities programme was to first establish a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) hosting anonymised hospital administrative data for the whole region.
This data was made securely and remotely accessible to a team of university-based data scientists working closely with front line NHS teams who played a key role in the development of the codes used to extract the data.
The work focused on providing new analytical tools to enhance the health care system’s ability to accurately track emergency care pathways, identify variation in activity, process and outcome and opportunities to improve care.
The methodologies and results were shared with the local health economy, seeking to bring new data-driven approaches to enabling, monitoring and guiding local QI initiatives.
Having established novel analytical approaches to the use of administrative data, we then explored opportunities to enhance the analytical tools through linkage to other datasets including primary care and by exploring alternatives to traditional statistical approaches.