Over 10 million people in the North of England now have better connected health and care records as part of a Learning Health System, thanks to the Connected Health Cities (CHC) initiative involving Lancaster University.

The £20m CHC programme – a Government 'Health North' initiative – saw healthcare, academic and industry experts from across the North work together to turn patient data into meaningful information insights.

This included the analysis of over 40m consultations and patient treatment, showing how an estimated £150m could be saved across the NHS through, for example, the use of more targeted community care instead of unplanned hospital admissions for patients with chronic conditions.

Dr Séamus O’Neill, Chief Executive, Northern Health Science Alliance, said: “The North of England is well-placed within the UK to drive health data and tech innovation in major areas of need with the highest disease burdens, grave inequalities and the greatest need for economic growth”.

Lancaster University took part in one of the four areas of CHC, the £4m North West Coast Consortium, which focussed on providing better coordinated health and social care for patients affected by alcohol misuse and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Lancaster’s work was led by the University’s Data Science Institute with contributions from the School of Computing and Communications, Faculty of Health and Medicine and Lancaster University Management School.

Professor Sumi Helal, Chair in Digital Health and the lead of the project at Lancaster said: “Learning how to build a Learning Health System (LHS) and understanding its challenges have been the greatest achievement in this project. The North now has the skills and the beginning of an amazing asset poised only to get smarter, as it develops further, in finding ways to improve care, cut cost, and eventually improve health outcomes and people’s quality of life”.

Lancaster brought together healthcare professionals from clinical, management and analytics specialisms to work with industry partners to tackle some of the barriers facing the adoption of health data innovations. Activities included developing an Analytics Skills Framework for health Informaticians, CPD delivery to create healthcare ‘Evidence Champions’ and Digital Think Tanks to investigate how healthcare and industry communities could better collaborate to generate data focused tools and services.

In addition, four Lancaster PhD students undertook research on:

· Real-time mapping of COPD emergency admissions including working with a clinician at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust and developing a model to predict the likely high incidence of COPD emergency admission.

· Understanding patient data coordination in alcohol care so healthcare professionals get the right information about the right patient in the right place at the right time.

· Designing a new innovative online system for respiratory care enabling clinicians to have a more meaningful view of clinical data on COPD patients, enabling better readiness planning and mobilisation of resources to improve COPD quality of care.

· Creating novel user-centred consent and data permission management in health data infrastructures and systems

Professor Jo Knight, Co-Director of Lancaster’s Data Science Institute said: “It was really exciting to bring together clinicians with PhD students from three different faculties to engage with routinely collected health care data and improve health outcomes.”

Dr O’Neill said: “With future investment we will make the North of England a global player in ethical use of data in healthcare and create a new paradigm of how industry engages with citizens on access to data.”