Improving Data
Find out about our focus on helping to improve the quality of health data, and thereby allowing for further insight.

As part of HDR UK’s mission to unite the UK’s health data to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives, one of the key strategic areas is to improve this data to allow for even greater insight.
Research from the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries and Medicines Discovery Catapult highlights quality of data as one of the top barriers to health data research.
The Health Data Research Hubs, supported by the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, have an explicit mandate to improve the data as part of the work they are doing to support innovation. This work includes mapping to data standards, curating the data to remove duplicates, annotating images and linking to other datasets. This work is also taking place as part of the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre.
Two of the national research priorities also support the work of Improving the Data:
- the Phenomics research theme aims to standardise the way that symptoms and diseases are recorded, to allow research to take place at a much greater scale.
- the Applied Analytics theme uses analytical tools such as machine learning to undertake research that will directly support clinical care.

Data Standards

Data Utility Evaluation
