Turning National Health Data Ambition into Delivery.

Health researchers in England needed access to NHS data without moving it. The infrastructure existed in pieces, run by different organisations, with different rules and different levels of maturity.

I built the executive partnerships that held the network together, across industry, government and academia. That meant getting organisations with competing interests into the same room, agreeing what good looked like, and keeping them there long enough for it to hold.

The Network became the route through which £600m was secured for the Health Data Research Service. The partnerships outlasted the funding round.

A national strategy was needed quickly, and the people it would land on had not been asked. Writing it centrally would have been faster. It also would have failed on contact with the system.

I ran the co-design instead. 1,300 stakeholders in seven weeks, structured so every session fed something concrete back into the drafting, not into a report nobody read.

The strategy carried £3.2bn of investment through the NHS Productivity Plan. More usefully, the people expected to deliver it recognised their own input in it.

Sweden holds some of the best health data in the world and has struggled to use it across regions, because the data is not described the same way twice.

I advised on adopting OMOP, a shared standard, and on the case for making that choice nationally rather than region by region. The work was as much about sequencing and who says yes first as it was about the standard itself.

A national mandate was secured. Sweden now has one way of describing its health data.