Future sustainability and performance of health and social care will be achieved through progressive digitisation of organisations, business processes, social communities, and individuals. Digitisation will create new ways to deliver public health, clinical diagnostics, self-health management and prevention, and operations management through a rich ecosystem of connected institutions, people, devices, and data. Collaborative sharing and linking of safe, useful data between different stakeholders under secure and rights-respecting conditions will be vital for development of data-driven health systems and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for health applications.
The Social Data Foundation ( www.socialdatafoundation.org ) is a partnership between Southampton City Council, the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, and the University of Southampton that has been established to improve public health and patient care by responsible data access, collaboration and (re-)usage across academia, the public sector and industry by removing barriers and accelerating existing processes whilst maintaining the highest standards for data governance and security. Legal, ethical, and social mechanisms must be brought together was the means to establish a trustworthy data sharing environment that delivers system transformation and public and patient benefit.