Yorkshire and Humber Care Record signs £4m population health contract

The Yorkshire and Humber Care Record has signed a £4million contract with three companies to provide the technology for a population health management tool.

The five-year contract will see Deloitte UK, Google Cloud and Synanetics work in partnership across the region with cyber security and data privacy at the heart of what they do.

The deal aims to improve the health of people by using information to plan care and to prevent illness.

Dr John Byrne, the newly announced senior responsible officer for the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record, said: “We look forward to beginning this important work to help us better understand the needs of the people living across the areas while ensuring the security and privacy of data remains of the highest importance.”

Rob Webster, chair of the Yorkshire and Humber digital care board, added: “After a thorough process, which involved expertise from a variety of leaders across our partnership, we look forward to reaping the benefits of this important piece of work to improve the health and wellbeing of people’s lives.”

The data collected and used will remain within the NHS, in compliance with data protection regulations.

All data will be encrypted, stored securely in the UK and will not be used for any other purposes beyond population health management.

The Yorkshire and Humber Care Record is one of five regions within NHS England’s Local Health and Care Record Exemplar (LHCRE) programme.

As part of their digital transformation programme the care record is committed to working with open standards, which NHSX has called for to enable information to be shared quickly and seamlessly across the healthcare system.

Before the care record was announced as one of the LHCRE cohort, it began the delivery of an open standards and open platform-based person held record (PHR) – originally conceived as a Leeds City-wide project in 2017.