Policy
Case Study: Policy for digital transformation of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS)
Since the turn of the millennium, governments around the world have looked to digital transformation to improve, make more efficient, and otherwise resolve issues faced by their health systems. To that end, policy has shaped the style, development, adoption, and utilisation of technologies in healthcare. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the drive to ‘data-led healthcare’ where governments have looked to utilise a combination of digital and bioscientific technologies with algorithmic and computational techniques to reshape care practices through the infrastructure, workforce, and deployment principals of their healthcare systems.
An explicit desire to build and utilise population level databases, using medical records as their source material, has been articulated in policy by governments around the world. This workpackage focuses on these articulations in Scotland and England. In NHS Scotland, ‘Data Safe Havens’ have been developed to drive bioscientific research and innovation, in NHS England ‘Secure Data Environments’, ‘Trusted Research Environments’, a ‘Federated Data Platform’, as well as a new ‘Single Patient Record’ system are each motivated by a desire to deliver ‘data-driven healthcare’. But what does it take to build this infrastructure of data-driven healthcare? What is the relationship between policy, innovation, and day-to-day care? In what ways does policy shape data, care, and learning in healthcare operations?
To that end, this scale is driven by the following research questions:
- How are the interrelations between the technical, social and ethical aspects of health data work framed in UK policy?
- How is value ascribed to data in the context of healthcare and what assumptions underpin the vision of a data-driven health system?
- What is silenced in the promissory narratives of digital transformation in healthcare and what are the implications of these absences?
- How do policy makers conceptualise data as a resource to be leveraged in relation to ‘safety’ and ‘error’ in healthcare?
