Care Data

A body called the Health and Social Care Information Centre will soon begin to extract and analyse some patient’s information that is held securely in GP practices, hospitals and community services.

Information will be extracted in a way that protects your identity and will be held in a secure system, its purpose being to improve NHS services.

You can read more about this, and about your choice to opt out if you wish, at www.nhs.uk/caredata.

 

Population Health Management – National Programme – Your Data

  • What is Population Health Management?

Population health management is aimed at improving the health of an entire population.

It is about improving the physical and mental health outcomes and wellbeing of people and making sure that access to services is fair and equal. It helps to reduce the occurrence of ill health and looks at all the wider factors that affect health and care.

Population health management requires health and social care organisations to work together with communities and partner agencies. The organisations involved will share de-identified information (where information about you has been removed) with each other in order to get a view of health and services for the population in a particular area.

In the north east London clinical commissioning group geography a national population health management programme has been introduced. The programme will combine this de-identified information from GP practices, community service providers, hospitals and other health and care providers to allow a comprehensive picture of health and care needs to be identified and services planned according to need.

  • How will my personal data be used?

The information needed for this programme will include information about your health and social care.  Information about you and your care will be used in the programme, but in a format that does not directly identify you; which we refer to within this privacy notice as pseudonymised.

The information will be used for a number of health and social care related activities such as:

  • improving the quality and standards of care provided
  • research into the development of new treatments
  • preventing illness and diseases
  • monitoring safety
  • planning services

 

  • Who will my personal data be shared with?

Your GP will provide the information they hold on their systems to the north east London clinical commissioning group (CCG), who are part of the NHS. North east London CCG will pseudonymise the data and only then share it with the north east London commissioning support unit (CSU). The coded data (from which individual people cannot be identified) will also be sent to another company called Optum.  Optum have been commissioned by NHS England to provide specialist analysis of the data.

They will link all the information (which does not directly identify you) together in order to review and make decisions about the whole population or patients that might need support. Both the Commissioning Support Unit and Optum are required to protect your information and maintain confidentiality at all times.

The GP practice you attend have agreed with north east London CCG and the north east London CSU to provide pseudonymised non-confidential extracts of data to the programme.  This will also entail north east London CCG and CSU providing pseudonymised non-confidential data to Optum on patient consultations and clinical coding so that an analysis of activity and outcomes can be completed.

As information included in this PHM programme from the practice will only ever be used in a de-identified form, current opt-outs will not apply as these only relate to the use of confidential patient information for purposes outside the individual’s direct care.

The GP practice will be the only ones able to re-identify their own patients in order to offer interventions that have been identified as being beneficial to them through the data analysis carried out.

  • Is using my information in this way lawful?

Health Care Providers are permitted by data protection law to use information where it is “necessary for medical purposes”. This includes caring for you directly as well as management of health services more generally.

Some of the work that happens at a national level with your information is required by other parts of the law. For more information, speak to our Data Protection Officer.

Sharing and using your information in this way helps to provide better health and care for you, your family and future generations. Confidential patient information about your health and care is only used where allowed by law and in the majority of cases, anonymised data is used so that you cannot be identified.

  • What will happen to my information when the project is finished?

For the NHS England and Improvement programme, data will be processed only for the duration of the programme.  Once the programme has completed the information will be securely destroyed from Optum systems.

North east London CSU working on behalf of the practice will retain the practice data as agreed for a maximum of 14 days to ensure that they successfully remove any identifiable data once this is accomplished the identifiable practice data will be securely destroyed. The remaining de-identified data will be used by analysts to provide health and social care statistics for PHM projects for the length of each project as agreed with the GP practice.

 

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