Post by Ele H.

Getting to work with the Emrys Health (Will Browne, Pollyanna J., Ben Levinson) team, Nesta (Mallory Durran, Natalie L., Will Woodward) team, Jessica Rose Morley, and Joe Zhang, was a huge career highlight. The fruits of this labour are being pusblished today in the Health Data Research Service Digital Ecosystem Analysis, an independent review commissioned by Wellcome Trust of the UK's health data infrastructure across all four nations. There's a bit of a habit of saying "it's not a technology problem" when it comes to health data, this review pushes back on that and brings some nuance. Yes, governance is fragmented, incentives are misaligned, and coordination has repeatedly failed. But the technology gaps are real and specific: no integration layer connecting our data assets, absent national linkage infrastructure, inconsistent compute, clinical data locked in source systems that no one has built the pipelines to unlock. Naming both these technical and non-technical infrastructure gaps precisely is the only way to make progress on either. The good news is that the components exist. SAIL, OpenSAFELY, CPRD, Scotland's national imaging archive - genuinely world-class, hard-won capabilities. The HDRS has a real opportunity to connect them into something that actually works as a national service. That is a big task, but it is a tractable one. Enormous thanks to everyone who contributed, especially The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), BioIndustry Association (BIA), ABHI, and techUK for coordinating industry voices, and to the SDEs, academic, government, charities and patient contributors across all four nations who made this possible. Thanks to Melanie Ivarsson OBE, Sobia Raza John Chevers and the rest of the HDRS and Wellcome Trust team for you feedback and guidance on the report https://lnkd.in/e6UFbFv6