Population Health Data

What does Population Health mean for you as a patient?

The Population Health platform enables health and care professionals to see your health records on their computers. Your health and care data is currently held by different organisations.

This allows us to share information about you with your direct care team, which may include GPs, hospital-based doctors and nurses and social workers. The sharing of information has previously happened using paper processes such as referral letters.

Being able to look at everyone’s health records together will help us create a database of information about our local population that will enable us to improve the care we provide and improve your health and wellbeing.

We will use this data in a number of different ways:

• To understand what the people who live in each area need, what health conditions and physical needs they have and what services are available to them
• To find out which of these services work well, which don’t, and how we can make them better together
• To spot when people are at risk of becoming poorly, or becoming frail as they get older, and to plan how to prevent this by intervening as early we can
• To measure whether things get better when we try something new.

Population Health will provide your care team with electronic access to the information they need to make the best decisions about your health and care by bringing all this data together, creating a single care record for services and practitioners alongside access to your own record.

Our ambition is to improve the way your health information is shared to improve health and care services. This will give the people directly involved in your care, access to information about you and provide:

• better coordinated care
• quicker diagnosis and treatment
• more accurate prescriptions
• more time to spend on clinical care
• less paperwork and repetition
• fewer unnecessary tests
• safe and secure decision-making.

In the future, this will shape the way health and social care services will be delivered and offer you more ownership of your own care.

Overall, we are trying to achieve three things:

1. the best possible health and wellbeing for the people of west Suffolk
2. the best possible experience of our services for the people who use them and the people who work in them
3. the best value for money from the funding Suffolk gets for health and care services.