The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care tasked NHSX (now the Transformation Directorate at NHS England and NHS Improvement) with bringing together key national organisations that use health and care data into a Data Alliance Partnership (DAP).
Read more about the DAP in the Secretary of State's speech to the NHS Confederation about the Busting Bureaucracy strategy.
The DAP member organisations are committed to maximising the benefits from using and sharing data already held in health and care systems in order to minimise the burden of collecting more data from frontline service providers. Simply put, wherever possible, the mission is to collect once and use for multiple purposes to benefit health and care provision and planning.
A new Data Alliance Partnership Board (DAPB) with responsibility to oversee the process, has been set up to support signed up DAP member organisations achieve its goals.
The new Data Alliance Partnership Board (DAPB), will:
- identify and, wherever possible reduce, duplication of data collections
- increase the benefits from data already held by making data accessible for legitimate purposes within existing legislation – the principle of collect once, use many times
- increase transparency by making clear what data the health and care system holds and how it is used – to be published as a single list of approved data collections
- have responsibility for approving information standards, data collections and extractions (ISCEs) to be used in health and adult social care.
The DAPB has replaced the Data Coordination Board and has taken over its function to approve ISCEs. Processes are being updated to ensure only data sets and data collections that provide validated benefits (which exceed the cost of data collection) to the system are approved to proceed, and that the system as a whole has greater and more timely access to the data that is collected.
If you have any questions or would like more information on the Data Alliance Partnership and the board, please contact: [email protected]
If you have questions about the assurance of ISCEs, please continue to contact the Data Standards Assurance Service within NHS Digital: [email protected]