How the NHS' new Federated Data Platform will enhance clinician and patient experiences

The NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) is driving digital transformation by unifying fragmented health and care data into a secure, connected and ‘federated’ ecosystem. Supporting priority areas such as elective recovery, vaccination, population health, care coordination and supply chain optimisation, it enables real-time insights while preserving local data ownership. With robust governance and transparency, the FDP provides the backbone for deploying advanced technologies, improving efficiency, and delivering seamless, patient centred care across the NHS.

What is the Federated Data Platform?

The FDP aims to address long-standing fragmentation across health and care data. Its vision is to create a secure, federated ecosystem that allows trusts and integrated care systems to analyse, link, and share information in near real time — while maintaining local ownership and strong privacy controls. The platform supports five priority use cases: elective recovery, vaccination and immunisation, population health management, care coordination, and supply-chain optimisation.

A key misconception is that the FDP is an electronic patient record (EPR) system or a replacement for one. It is not. Instead, it sits on top of EPRs and other clinical systems as an operational intelligence layer, bringing their data together to support decision making and resource planning.

When implemented effectively, the FDP enables more accurate forecasting, streamlined patient flow, shorter waiting lists, and consistent, comparable analytics across the NHS.

What makes FDP different from care.data?

The fundamental difference lies in how data is handled and governed. 

The FDP uses a federated model where data remains under the control of local NHS trusts. Information is accessed ‘in situ’ using a shared ontology, rather than being copied into a single central repository.

Care.data attempted to centralise data nationally and faced significant public mistrust due to perceived lack of transparency and an automatic opt-in approach.

The FDP places transparency at its core. It has strong information governance, clearer patient safeguards, and oversight from an independent check and challenge group. It also respects patient choices, directly addressing the issues that contributed to care.data’s failure.

How does the FDP fit into digital transformation within the NHS?

The FDP is the central nervous system of the NHS’s digital transformation agenda, as outlined in the 10-Year Health Plan and the Medium-Term Planning Framework. It helps shift the NHS from a historically fragmented organisation into a system that is ‘digital by default’.

The platform provides the data infrastructure needed to safely deploy other transformative technologies — AI, robotics, genomics and wearables — at scale. It also underpins the move from hospital-based care to community-based care, and from reactive treatment to preventative, population-level health management.

Without a platform like the FDP, the NHS’s broader digital ambitions would lack the coherent data backbone required for success.

Give us an overview of the project's scale and complexity, and tell us about your involvement.

The FDP is a major national initiative, delivered over seven years and connecting hundreds of NHS organisations and countless legacy systems — each using different data standards, structures and technologies. Its complexity lies in achieving interoperability across this diverse landscape.

As part of the programme, I led an FDP Working Group across the North West London Acute Provider Collaborative. I developed a unified process map adopted by four trusts, reduced FDP incidents by 85%, and designed end-to-end architecture showing the flow of data from Cerner EPR, through Oracle and local data warehouses, into FDP applications.

During implementation, two lessons became clear:

• Data quality must be assured at the EPR level before data flows into FDP to avoid magnifying errors.
• Selecting a low-latency data warehouse bridge is essential for delivering near real-time operational insights.

Talk us through the challenges in achieving interoperability between multiple systems and databases.

Interoperability challenges stem from several long-standing issues:

• Disparate systems: NHS organisations use a wide variety of EPRs and custom data warehouses, each configured differently
• Inconsistent data standards: beyond basic standards like Health Level Seven (HL7), variation in coding and data modelling makes integration difficult
• Data quality: poor-quality source data creates significant barriers; it must be corrected at the EPR level before being ingested by the FDP
• Governance differences: different organisations may interpret data protection or DPIA (Data Protection Impact Assessment) requirements differently, adding process complexity

The FDP mitigates these issues through its Ontology Management Application, which standardises data definitions, and tools like Contour and Quiver, which automate data validation and highlight data quality issues early.

From a patient perspective, what should FDP enabled care feel like? And, from a clinical perspective, how should the FDP make processes better and smoother?

For patients, FDP-enabled care should feel joined-up and seamless. They should experience fewer repeated questions, smoother discharges, shorter waiting times and better coordination between hospitals, community services, and social care.

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For clinicians, the FDP makes operational processes more efficient. It enables near real-time bed visibility, smoother handovers, automated RTT (referral to treatment) validation, improved outpatient flow, and safer discharge planning through tools such as OPTICA.

Crucially, clinicians must understand that the FDP supports — not replaces — their EPR. It is a data intelligence platform designed to reduce friction, not a clinical documentation system.

What skills have you developed or enhanced while working on the FDP?

Working on the FDP significantly deepened my technical expertise with Palantir Foundry tools (e.g., Pipeline Builder, Contour, Quiver, Ontology Manager), cloud-based data engineering and high-performance data architecture.

It also strengthened my leadership skills, particularly in cross-trust collaboration, transformation strategy, and stakeholder management.

What information governance arrangements are in place to build public and professional trust, and provide evidence of accountability, and transparency?

Trust is essential. According to NHS Federated Data Platform website (https://tinyurl.com/mevmhuwp), FDP uses a multi-layered governance model:

• Each NHS trust and ICB remains the data controller for its own instance, ensuring local accountability
• Nationally, the programme is overseen by an independent check and challenge group, which includes the National Data Guardian and Patients Association
• Processing is governed by the Data Protection Act 2018 and incorporates robust access controls, audit trails and privacy-by-design principles
• Privacy enhancing technologies support de-identification for planning and analytics
• Patients retain full rights under GDPR, including subject access requests.
• Importantly, the vendor is contractually prohibited from commercialising NHS data or using it to train AI models

Finally, you're an active BCS member. Tell us about how membership benefits you and your career.

BCS provides a strong platform for continuous learning, thought leadership (such as the fellowship programme), and engagement with the wider IT community. Its emphasis on professionalism and ethical practice aligns closely with the principles that guide the FDP. Being part of BCS has enriched my career through networking, knowledge sharing, and opportunities to influence digital transformation across the NHS.

Henry Obison FBCS is a Senior Applications Business Analyst at the NHS with 17 years’ IT experience, an MSc in Information Systems, and several Microsoft certifications. He specialises in digital transformation, improving efficiency, enhancing data flows and reducing costs through automation, database projects, and modern data-driven solution architecture.