Chelsea and Westminster pilots clinical letters tool on FDP

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is running user acceptance testing for a Referral to Treatment (RTT) clinical letters validation tool on the federated data platform (FDP).

The tool is designed to streamline RTT pathway management by automatically identifying letters mentioning ‘discharge’ or ‘discharged’ – potentially highlighting patients ready for removal – and those referencing ‘rapid access’ clinics, which could signal pathway closures.

The tightly scoped live test is intended to provide real-world insights into how the module can help Chelsea and Westminster reduce review times and optimise its RTT processes, according to the April 2025 FDP bulletin from NHS England.

In the bulletin, Ming Tang, chief data analytics officer and newly appointed interim chief digital and information officer at NHSE, said that implementation targets for the FDP have been exceeded, with 72 hospital trusts now realising benefits from use of the platform, surpassing NHSE’s goal of 71 for this financial year.

It adds that 108 hospital trusts, up from 96 in February 2025, and 41 integrated care boards have signed up to the FDP.

Tang said: “This spring marks a pivotal milestone as the NHS FDP completes its first year of operation.

“The impact on patient care has been immediate and meaningful, with the platform supporting 70,000 extra surgeries through increased theatre utilisation.”

There has been an 18.8% decrease in the average number of delay days for long stay patients for trusts using the FDP, the bulletin highlights.

It also said that there has been an increase in the checks that the right actions have been taken along the patient care pathway, with more than 270,000 patients removed from the waiting list for a number of reasons.

“Having successfully established the programme’s foundation, our second year focuses on amplifying impact.

“We have created a dedicated workstream to partner with Community and Mental Health NHS Trusts, addressing their specific challenges through tailored data solutions,” Tang said.

In February 2025, NHSE announced that a cancer diagnostic pathway management service is among the new products running on the FDP to go live in 2025.

The Cancer 360 service connects data from disparate systems about patients on a cancer diagnosis pathway.

This “transforms cancer diagnostic pathway management with a single automatically updated patient tracking list, with active pathway management, escalation mechanisms and data driven performance insights”, NHSE said.

Meanwhile, in March 2025 the Chief Data and Analytics Officers Network (CDAON) raised concerns about whether the FDP is capable of supporting local health systems.

In an open letter to Tang, Dr Marc Farr, chair of the CDAON and national chair of the Association of Professional Healthcare Analysts, said that the FDP programme is promoting “the adoption of specific tools or modules on a single software platform” as opposed to the integration of data and interoperability.

The NHSE 2025/26 priorities and operational planning guidance, published on 30 January 2025, mandates that all systems adhere to the ‘FDP first’ policy, connecting their own digital and data infrastructure to the FDP.