NHSE creating national population health management tool for FDP

NHS England is working with NHS Frimley Integrated Care Board (ICB) to create a national population health management tool which will run on the federated data platform (FDP).

Speaking at NHS Confed Expo 2025 in Manchester on 11 June 2025, Vin Diwakar, national director for transformation at NHSE, said that “there’s loads of things that you can do” with the FDP.

“We’re already seeing the benefits in individual organisations, where integrating systems help people improve theatre productivity, speed up discharge rates, coordinate waiting lists better, etc.

“But also within it we’ve got a solution marketplace, which is where companies that are not the main provider of the platform can come in and work with the provider to create new innovations in the platform.

“So one of the innovations that we’re working on with Sam [Burrows] and also in Cheshire, at Merseyside and in Cumbria, is creating a population health management tool, a strategic commissioning tool that offers a single version of the treatment for the data that’s based on a common data model nationally.

“And secondly, it allows you to then do the population segmentation, the stratification, identify the cohorts, the analytics, the case findings, the scenario modelling.

“There’s an end-to-end product and everybody’s doing the same thing, so that Frimley can compare how it’s doing to other areas of the country that have got similar characteristics.”

He added that it was an innovation that “helps with health inequalities in a national platform”.

Sam Burrows, interim chief executive at NHS Frimley ICB, told Digital Health News that Diwakar is trying to “build something very similar nationally in the FDP” to Frimley Health and Care’s PHM platform which has been running for around four years as part of its Connected Care programme.

He added that the PHM solution, powered by Graphnet Health, takes data from primary care, secondary care, community care, mental health, local authority and social care, which is used to risk stratify the population.

“The risk strat score goes back into the record, which then the clinicians can see and will use for planning and transformation for the services we design,” Burrows explained.

“It’s a dual use – one use is for care delivery so more clinicians can see more data about the population. The other use is the helicopter effect when in a particular neighbourhood or cohort of the population we’re seeing an emerging problem, so what are we going to do about it?”

Burrows said that NHS Frimley ICB is working in partnership with Diwakar to provide him with its learnings from the last decade and give advice on what needs to be considered to create a national PHM.

The project follows concerns raised by the Chief Data and Analytics Officers Network (CDAON) about the FDP. In February 2025, Dr Marc Farr, chair of the CDAON, wrote an open letter to NHSE questioning whether the FDP is capable of meeting “all the bespoke requirements of a local system to support the health of its citizens through better data and intelligence”.