Future Health has announced it is partnering with the All Party Parliamentary Group for Longevity on a new Open Life Data Framework. Future Health Founder and Programme Director, Richard Sloggett is a part of the core team developing the Framework, which is being supported by a grant from the Health Foundation.

The Open Life Data framework was a recommendation of The Health of the Nation Strategy published a year ago by the APPG to deliver the government goal of 5 extra years of healthy life expectancy while reducing health inequalities (‘HLE+5’).   The framework will help researchers, policymakers and entrepreneurs work out what non-health data (like mobility, consumer, financial, environmental) and health data (like medical records) provide the most insight into helping individuals keep healthy while enhancing overall health resilience at a population health level.  This insight will guide the development of ethical, trusted solutions across the private, public, not-for-profit and academic sectors to meet the HLE+5 goal.

The framework will identify strategies to achieve pandemic resilience, develop use cases for innovators and entrepreneurs, and inform the value of UK health data assets to feed into the UK economic strategy and its global ambition to lead in science and AI.

The principles and methodology of Open Banking will be applied to make health and non-health data useful at scale, taking learnings from the finance model that has successfully opened up innovation to benefit UK consumers.

The group, comprising 40 experts, is chaired by Lord James O’Shaughnessy, former Undersecretary of Health and visiting professor at Imperial College.  The core team includes Gavin Starks, CEO of Dgen, and co-architect of the Open Banking standard; Professor Iain Buchan, Executive Dean, University of Liverpool; Richard Sloggett, Founder and Programme Director, Future Health Research Centre; and Lord Geoff Filkin and Tina Woods, co-authors of the Health of the Nation Strategy.

Richard Sloggett said: “I am delighted that Future Health is working with the APPG Longevity on a new Open Life Data Framework. The APPG’s ambition for increasing healthy life expectancy by 5 years should be a rallying call for politicians and policymakers as we look to build back better beyond Covid.

The role that data can play in the transformation of healthcare systems has been accelerated by this pandemic. How we now utilise the power of data to improve patient outcomes and health system performance in the future is one of the core challenges facing us. For Future Health to be involved so early in our history is really exciting. I am looking forward to working with the core team and other experts in building the framework in the weeks and months ahead.”

The announcement of the partnership comes a day after the Government announced a review into the efficient and safe use of health data, led by Dr Ben Goldacre: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-review-into-use-of-health-data-for-research-and-analysis