Our workstreams

Building on our early work in cancer data, we work closely with Public Health Scotland (PHS) teams and the cancer policy team to progress policy initiatives and to maximise the value of data currently collected across our systems to document cancer care.

Our current focus is on supporting the work of the PHS Scottish Cancer Registry and Intelligence Service (SCRIS) to deliver their objectives in relation to national data, in particular for chemotherapy data and radiotherapy data. We are also supporting the delivery of a patient reported outcomes (PROMS) project in prostate cancer aligning with the national programme of work relating to PROMS and developing shared learning to inform PROMS implementation in other areas. 

The value of audit to inform healthcare improvement is well recognised and data is a key component of audit programmes. Our partnership with PHS Scottish National Audit Programme (SNAP) is well established and while we continue to support the work of the Scottish Cardiac Audit Programme (SCAP), we are also focussing on transformation across the audit programme. This includes looking at the value of the data gathered to inform our understanding of healthcare inequalities and the social determinants of health, what the combined audit dataset can tell us about the care delivered to patients across Scotland and how this compares nationally and internationally, and how we share best practice across the audits to consistently drive improvements in care. PROMS also feature in this workstream, in supporting the audits to build a picture of 

Building on our work to support the Data and Digital policy team, we will continue to collate data narratives to build our understanding of the everyday experiences of digital health and data. Another aim of this workstream is to share learning of the value of data across our programmes and support groups to make sense of their own service data to inform service development and improve digital health and care.

Innovation is in our title and also an area where our partnerships and collaborative approach to work are key to supporting innovation across the health service. Key areas of work for this year include continuing our partnership with Digital Health and Care Institute (DHI) and Scottish Enterprise (SE), working with Research Data Scotland (RDS) on scaling their work on working with commercial partners to drive innovation and the development of an implementation framework as part of work with NHS Lothian clinical teams. 

This work will add to our understanding of innovation and the challenges of implementation at service level.

By involving stakeholders proactively and raising awareness of their needs and concerns with our partner organisations and our programmes of work, digital health solutions are more likely to be accepted, adopted, and sustained over time, facilitating wider dissemination and impact. Through a participatory network approach, we aim to maintain active engagement with individuals and communities of practice to inform our work and highlight areas of best practice.

We will establish and strengthen connections across the following groups:

• Patients and lived experience
• Industry partners
• Clinical practitioners and service providers
• Researchers and analysts
• Third sector and policy makers