NHS Digital
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| non-departmental public body overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1 April 2013 |
| Jurisdiction | England |
| Headquarters | Leeds |
| Motto | Information and technology for better health and care |
| Employees | 2500 |
| Annual budget | £250m |
| non-departmental public body executives |
|
| Parent department | Department of Health |
| Website | digital |
NHS Digital, formerly the Health and Social Care Information Centre is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health. The organisation was re-branded as NHS Digital on 1 August 2016. It is the national provider of information, data and IT systems for commissioners, analysts and clinicians in health and social care.
Its work includes managing digital projects such as the NHS Spine, E-Referral service, NHS.UK and NHS Mail. It makes sure these and other national systems meet contractual, clinical safety and information standards. It also provides a range of specialist data services.
Previously known as the NHS Information Centre, it produces more than 260 official and national statistical publications. This includes national comparative data for secondary uses, developed from the long-running Hospital Episode Statistics which can help local decision makers to improve the quality and efficiency of frontline care.
It stores and analyses data on activity in the NHS and social care in England, including hospital episode statistics (HES).
The organisation was created as a special health authority on 1 April 2005 by a merger of parts of the Department of Health, parts of the NHS Information Authority, and the Prescribing Support Unit.
Following the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the HSCIC changed from a special health authority to an Executive Non-Departmental Public Body (ENDPB) on 1 April 2013. Effective at this time, HSCIC took over parts of the troubled NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) from the agency NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) which ceased to exist. It also runs the Health Survey for England (HSE).
On 20 April 2016, it was announced that HSCIC would be rebranding, changing its name to NHS Digital in July 2016.
A programme called care.data was announced by the HSCIC in Spring 2013. It aimed to extract data from GP surgeries into a central database through the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES). Members of the English population who were registered with GP practices were informed that data on their health would be uploaded to HSCIC unless they exercised their rights to object by informing their GP. Data on patients who did not object would then be used in anonymised form by health care researchers, managers and planners including those outside the NHS such as academic institutions or commercial organisations. The use of identifiable data is governed by the common law on confidentiality, UK data protection legislation, the National Health Service Act 2006 and the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Identifiable data can only be released in compliance with those laws. Software and services are being provided by Atos which has itself received criticism for some of its other UK government projects.
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