Welcome to the London Discovery Data Service knowledge base

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These articles describe the London Discovery Data Service; the architecture that underpins the data service, the components that make up the service, the testing and assurance processes, and the resources, open source technologies, and software that are used to host, develop, and support the service.

London Discovery Data Service status

  • The data service is live.
  • It currently stores and processes the data from 39 million linked organisational patient records in the UK.
  • It contains long term records on 15.7 million unique UK citizens who have been resident in London at some point in the last 30 years (including people who have left or died).
  • Data on individuals are held in a single common data model with data values represented by a super ontology composed of the world's leading health ontologies.
  • Data in Discovery is submitted by health providers who provide primary, secondary, and urgent care services to patients or clients.
  • Data is kept up to date in close to real time - at worst within 24 hours; see Latency of extract data feeds for more details.

London Discovery overview

These articles provide background to the ideas, philosophies and approaches that have resulted in the Discovery Data Service. They cover the original objectives, the approach to collaboration and shared tenancy, and the information governance rules that underpin the way privacy and sharing are balanced.

  • What is Discovery? - This article describes what Discovery is and how it is conceptualised at a very high level.
  • Case studies - An overview of some initial projects that access and utilise data from Discovery; information includes the applicant, project summary, and the latest status (Development/Live).
  • Latest news - The latest information for all Discovery Data Service releases and changes, plus known issues and updates from system suppliers and other third parties.
  • Current data sets - the broad types of data received from various systems.
  • Current published data - provides the latest data publisher information by sector, geographical area, service, and system provider.

Information model topics

This is the starting point for those interested in health data and the information derived from it, and why Discovery may be different from other approaches:

The health information model services are maintained as open source by the Endeavour health charitable trust. They use standard W3C semantic web languages to model health data, concepts, sets, and queries, thus maintaining compatibility with the main stream technologies.

Publishers and subscribers

These articles provide some brief high level information for organisations that send data to Discovery and those that use that data.

  • Publishers - includes technical interface information, FHIR mapping, system requirements, and how to make changes to publishing services.
  • Subscribers - includes set up, data mapping, and schema information.
  • National data opt-out - includes information on the NHS national data opt-out and how this is applied in the Discovery Data Service.

Services and applications

These articles provide information about the services and applications provided by the Discovery information services.

  • Sextant - A data set distribution service with an option to post the data directly into the recipients database.
  • Monitoring and alerting - provides an overview of the monitoring and alert systems in place.
  • Data Sharing manager- DSM provides a visual representation of data that is being shared and processed and by which organisations, regions, and/or services.
  • ASSIGN- UPRN address matching application - a web based application that matches single or batches of hand entered address to authoritative addresses and assigns a unique property reference number.
  • FHIR Get Structured Record API - returns a complete patient record in a structured format following GP and Care Connect standards.
  • HL7v2 API - Send HL7v2 ADT and ORU (clinical events) data to Discovery.
  • Get health record - the service that obtains a fully structured health record about a person, in real time via a standards based API.
  • Record publication service - the service that publishes data from health records for specific purposes, often immediately on receipt.
  • Data set distribution service - the service that distributes sets of data for populations of patients where the definition is complex or where the subscriber is hosting a copy of the data permanently.
  • NHS 111 Discovery frailty flagging / Frailty algorithm
  • GitHub repositories - descriptions and information relating to the application source code.

Architectures

These articles provide information about the overall high level software architecture models providing a descriptions and visualisations of the Discovery Data Service and information service components and how they interact.

  • The Data Storage Architecture illustrates how data is stored within the service and the various implementation options available for organisations that wish to use some or parts of the services.
  • Identity, authentication and authorisation specifies the approach taken by Discovery for accessing utilities and controlling some aspects of access to application functionality and some data resources, after all of the other locks have been opened.
  • Application zone architecture illustrates how the data is accessed in different places and in different ways according to different use cases
  • Pseudonymisation describes how Discovery generates pseudonymised data.
  • Data linking describes how Discovery links several patient records into a single person/citizen record.

Application help

  • Data Sharing Manager - Data Sharing Manager provides a visual representation of data that is being shared and processed and by which organisations, regions, and/or services.
    You can also amend or cancel data sharing and processing agreements in real time.
  • Record Viewer - Record Viewer shows a combined view of an individual's patient records, using data from different source organisations.

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