Health Data

We are working with regional partners to tackle vital challenges for healthcare that can only be addressed using the unique opportunities emerging from a digital NHS.

Big data can rapidly turn into big noise without the proper analytics to make sense of it.

In healthcare, innovations like artificial intelligence and machine learning are radically improving our ability to spot diseases, identify risks, and tailor therapies. But beyond the modelling of a condition, expert knowledge is also needed to annotate, code, curate and in turn interpret data and convert it into meaningful insight.

While the NHS contains some of the richest health data in the world, helping researchers learn more about the relationships between the biological, environmental and socioeconomic aspects of disease, the ability to extract useful information from patient records has been limited because of the data’s scale and heterogeneity.

The University of Birmingham has partnered with leading organisations to extract useful insights that are arising from a digital NHS.

In 2018 the West Midlands region received significant investment from Health Data Research UK to establish a new consortium to address challenging healthcare issues through the use of data science.

Together with our fellow Birmingham Health Partners member University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, we have formed part of the Midlands site, alongside the Universities of Leicester, Nottingham and Warwick.

Working collaboratively as foundation partners in Health Data Research UK, we will make game-changing improvements in people’s health by harnessing data science at scale across the UK.

Following an invitation to the University to join the Alan Turing Institute, as the Institute expanded its university network from its five founding university partners to 13, 22 researchers from across the University were appointed Alan Turing Fellows in 2018, joining the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.

“The Midlands HDR UK Substantive Site award is hugely exciting... By bringing together excellence in research and healthcare informatics and data science across Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham and Warwick, we have a unique opportunity for innovation to improve diagnosis, refine prognosis and personalise treatment for patients regionally and nationally.”

Professor Simon Ball

Director of the HDR UK – Midlands site

Discover more

HDR UK - Midlands
A regional Health Data Research UK site that is developing and applying cutting edge data science approaches in order to address the most pressing health research challenges facing the public.
Centre for Computational Biology
Established to promote excellence in computational biology, systems biology and bioinformatics across a range of fundamental and applied sciences, including the health care arena.
Birmingham Health Partners
A strategic partnership to harness research strengths in the University of Birmingham and NHS to deliver better treatments and care to patients.
Research and Innovation at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust
Our partner University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust is recognised as an NHS Global Digital Exemplar, with strength in health data research to improve quality of care and improve understanding of disease.
Healthcare Evaluation Data for UK Health Data Benchmarking
Healthcare Evaluation Data (HED) is an online benchmarking solution that allows healthcare organisations to utilise analytics which harness HES (Hospital Episode Statistics), national inpatient and outpatient and ONS (Office for National Statistics).
The Alan Turing Institute - University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is part of the Alan Turing Institute and works with all Turing partners, and the wider data science and artificial intelligence community, to advance the world-changing potential of data science.
Institute of Translational Medicine
Established to promote a ‘Network Medicine’ approach to translational and clinical science leading the development of high dimensional, multimodal, multiomic data integration approaches coupled with clinical as well as molecular and imaging expertise.