Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Kamall on 7 June 2022 (HL500), what work was undertaken by NHS Digital in June 2022 (1) to improve the access to relevant data which identifies those who are immunocompromised, and (2) to build a technical platform to identify such patients for different interventions, such as treatments and vaccines.

In June 2022, NHS Digital were in the process of improving the COVID-19 General Practice Extraction Service to ensure it could be used to identify and extract data on those patients considered at risk for COVID-19 and potentially eligible for specific interventions, such as therapeutics and vaccinations. This has now been developed and delivered by General Practice Information Technology systems, and now informs the identification of ‘at risk’ patients for support.

Strategic work to build a platform to assist with identification of patients for different interventions such as treatments and vaccines was fully underway in June 2022. The platform is called ‘cohorting as a service’ and pulls together available data sources to enable patients to be repeatably identified. This service securely identifies groups of people with shared characteristics from national health data, enabling tailored direct care to be delivered to improve health and social care outcomes.