Connected Health cities is a new project that aims to combine health technology data with the objective of improving health services for patients in Northern England. As a data driven project, various statistical challenges are to be expected. During this session we have the pleasure of hearing from Dr Keith Bodger, who will cover some of the analysis and methodology related aspects of the project, and from Dr Duncan Appelbe, who will discuss some of the technical aspects of the initiative.

14.00-15.00 Dr Keith Bodger (Gastroenterologist and lead for Alcohol related illnesses, University of Liverpool)

The Connected Health Cities programme aims to explore better ways to use data from healthcare and other sources to support the development of learning healthcare systems.  Making better use of currently available datasets presents a number of challenges.  All NHS hospitals generate standardised sets of routine administrative data, containing information about inpatient admissions, outpatient visits and accident and emergency attendances.  Despite many limitations, these basic datasets are used extensively within the NHS to support service planning and delivery, commissioning and financial flows, clinical quality assurance and benchmarking of care processes and outcomes.  They are a key source of data for public health analysis and have been used extensively in research.  This lecture will describe some of the challenges and pitfalls presented by these datasets and potential methodological approaches to maximise their value, emphasising the importance of harnessing clinical knowledge of disease processes, care pathways and service organisation to convert the data into actionable information that has face-validity with front line teams.

15.00-15.15 Coffee Break

15.15-15.40 Dr Duncan Appelbe, (Information Systems Manager, Medicines for Children Research Network Clinical Trials Unit,University of Liverpool)

Dr Duncan Appelbe will talk on subjects linked to the Health Cloud – the data storage system for the project.  The talk will cover aspects of the data such as its origin, structure, accessing and analysing the data.

15.40-16.00 Q&A with invited speakers