The chief executive of the Information Centre has made it clear that Dr Foster Intelligence has no privileged access to data, as part of its partnership.
Speaking at a Health Service Journal (HSJ) conference last month, Tim Straughan said organisations should not have to pay external companies such as Dr Foster for data, as the company has no special rights to the data.
Straughan is quoted in the HSJ as saying: “Dr Foster Intelligence does not re-sell raw NHS data and Dr Foster Intelligence has no privileged access to data. Nor does the Information Centre. The Information Centre and Connecting for Health are investigating ways of making access to data simpler.
“Data is currently available to anybody who applies for Patient Information Advisory Group permission. The current system is fair and equal. It is just very demanding and was never intended to be contractual.”
He admitted NHS organisations needed better information for benchmarking their performance and said the private sector should be used only where organisations wanted the data to be analysed in a particular way.
“We need really clear nationally agreed standards and definitions," he said. "It’s your data and you should have it in a basic form free of charge,” adding “You should not have to pay for it just to get it at all.”
The remarks follow recent employment tribunal proceedings, where former chief executive, Professor Denise Lievesley, told of her serious concerns over the initial deal between the Information Centre and Dr Foster Intelligence.
The public-private partnership, created to improve public access to health and social care information, was launched in January 2006, and was subsequently the subject of a National Audit Office investigation.
Straughan stressed that Dr Foster Intelligence was not getting preferential treatment, and urged the NHS not to believe this.
“In terms of the view that Dr Foster has everything and has access over everybody else, that’s absolutely a strong perception and that’s absolutely what I’m trying to make sure does not happen,” he added.
He pledged to focus the Information Centre on getting comparative information out to trusts, who could then use it in a meaningful way.
Dr Foster said it supported the Information Centre and welcomed competition from other suppliers.
In a statement, the company said: “We fully support the Information Centre’s efforts to improve access to data to the NHS either directly or through the value-added knowledge management systems and services that we have sold to three quarters of English hospitals and more than half of primary care trusts.
“We have seen a number of new market entrants and existing players compete ferociously for this business. We welcome this competition as it improves the quality and ingenuity of the services we supply.”
Straughan also told the conference the sector needed to make more use of data before it gets cleaned, as partly cleaned information could still be a useful indicator of trends.
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