Introduction

A deep dive into health data architecture, data flows, and data capabilities across NHS England, through understandable schematics and explainers.

We are reaching out to the wider community for collaboration and contribution through this form. For now, this is an early proof of concept and a ‘living document’ that will be continually updated. All work provided as open source under MIT license. Source files (main schematic built in draw.io) found in the Github repository.

Previous work in mapping data flows found in Zhang, Morley et al., 2023 and Data Insights UK. This last work, conducted to support recommendations of Better, Broader, Safer 2022, was focused on high-level but comprehensive understanding of what individual flows existed (est. 60,000 in one year) and who was extracting and using data. The new work provides a different view of the landscape, by focusing on systems and technical architectures, that are key to informing feasibility and gap analysis for technical data programmes.

Figure of Data flows from Zhang, Morley et al., 2023