Health Foundation Evaluative Analytics

Resources and code: GitHub Profile

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The Health Foundation Evaluative Analytics

The Health Foundation’s programme of evaluative analytics provides information about the impact of changes to how health and care is delivered, to enable local and national teams to improve the quality of care. The Improvement Analytics Unit is an important partnership to help us deliver our work.

Improvement Analytics Unit

The Improvement Analytics Unit (IAU) is an innovative partnership between NHS England & NHS Improvement (NHS E-I) and the Health Foundation. We use robust evaluative analytics to better understand the impact of health and care interventions in England. We work closely with NHS providers, their partners and commissioners both at national and local level to identify whether improvement initiatives are working well and what might need to change in the future to ultimately improve outcomes for patients. Read more about our work at the Health Foundation. On GitHub we collect and share resources and code from our work.

Team members and collaborators

Projects are completed by members of the Improvement Analytics Unit, often with collaborators.

Members of the team

Collaborators and former members

Approach to working openly

We are committed to working openly to increase the reproducibility and transparency of our work and to enable us to collaborate with others. We aim to share our code and documentation for our projects. We want to share our code as a resource for others analysing health care data and learn from their experiences.

Data sources and data management

We use a range of data sources, including publicly available data, and large administrative patient-level data for which we are data processors on behalf of NHS England and NHS Improvement. Each repository will include details on the data used and the mechanism by which we were able to access these data.

Of course, we never share data unless we have permission to do so. We handle all confidential data on a secure server (our Secure Data Environment) which is certified to the ISO27001 information security management standard. It is also recognised by NHS Digital for the Data Security and Protection Toolkit.

Project outputs are released from the server after they have been assessed for statistical disclosure to ensure that nothing is released which could be used to re-identify a patient, and/or contain confidential information. Best practice guidance on this process (Statistical Disclosure Control, SDC) can be found in the SDC Handbook.

Publications

Our work may be published in the format of a blog, a Health Foundation briefing, preprints, or as a peer-reviewed academic journal article, depending on the nature of the analysis. Relevant publications will be linked in each repository.

Contact us

For more information on any of the projects please contact the contributor.

If you want to know more about the Health Foundation Improvement Analytics Unit please contact Arne Wolters, Head of the Improvement Analytics Unit who leads the team, and can be found on twitter @4RN3W0L73R5 or you can contact us via GitHub.