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Creating a new NHS England: NHS England and NHS Digital merged on 1 February 2023. More about the merger.

Digital, research, informatics and virtual environments (DRIVE) partnership

A new technology innovation centre has opened at Great Ormond Street Hospital, with backing from us and several technology companies, to transform the use of technology including artificial intelligence in healthcare and improve patient outcomes.

The state-of-the-art unit, called DRIVE – Digital, Research, Informatics and Virtual Environments is the first of its kind in the world. It is both a physical and conceptual unit and is the result of a unique partnership between us, Great Ormond Street Hospital, University College London and leading industry experts in technology, artificial intelligence and digital innovation. 

The DRIVE unit will be a ‘hot-house’ for exploration activity, a rich environment for our technologists to work alongside industry and academic colleagues, and the launchpad for concepts which can be ‘scaled-up’ within our delivery programs or within regional and local technology programmes across the system.

The program’s interests in more rigorously exploring the third party market of commodity products and services for use in health and care is very much aligned with those of our organisation.

We see the potential for deployment of cross-sector commodity technology across many different areas of our work. Our first three areas of focus will be:

  1. The use of commodity integrated-communication technologies to drive collaboration across the system, including video and secure messaging channels as well as traditional email, and integration of these functions with NLP technologies to enable voice-to-text automation, and automated coding of terminology from voice streams.
  2. Exploring how best to gain from the explosion in ML, NLP and other AI technologies to enable better leverage of the hugely-rich data within the health and care system to derive new insights about effective and efficient approaches to clinical service provision and to management of the NHS system.
  3. Exploring the use of commodity cloud data management and hosting services from hyper-cloud providers to deliver national platforms to facilitate alignment to NHS data standards, particularly FHIR messaging and SNOMED CT to ICD-11 mapping.

Read the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Great Ormond Street Hospital and NHS Digital detailing the nature of our partnership. 

Last edited: 7 September 2021 10:34 am