Infrastructure and Services - Useable Data

The UK holds vast amounts of health data, but much of it is stored in incompatible formats, making it nearly impossible to combine and analyse at scale. This programme tackles a fundamental infrastructure problem: health data is collected by hospitals, GP surgeries, clinical trials, and research studies, often using different systems and standards. A patient’s hospital records, for example, might not link easily to their primary care data or to a clinical trial they participated in. This fragmentation prevents researchers from working across large populations or combining datasets to spot patterns that single studies cannot reveal. If successful, the programme will create standardised tools and approaches that allow different types of health data to be brought together seamlessly. This would let researchers run larger, more powerful studies—for instance, testing new drugs or treatments across broader patient groups in clinical trials. The impact is largely invisible to the public: better data infrastructure means faster, more reliable health research without anyone having to change how they interact with the NHS. It is an engineering and standards project, not a discovery science one, but it underpins nearly every major advance in modern medicine.