This research will create a map of patient symptoms, diseases, patient care and use of medicines and outcomes in GPs and hospitals, with particular attention to people with multiple long-term conditions. This map will researchers, doctors and policy makers to understand and improve how medicines are used, aiming to maximise the benefit for patients while reducing any harms from those medicines. Results from this research will be used to improve guidelines for patient care and to customise medicines to individual patients to improve their treatment. The programme will have a major focus on health and race inequalities, where multiple long-term conditions and care involving multiple medications are more common. This will pioneer new ways to improve patient care across the UK and internationally.

The Social and Environmental Determinants of Health programme will enable data from many different sources to be linked together to support research into understanding how different social and environmental factors affect our health and wellbeing, initially looking at childhood and ageing. With public involvement, it will develop the secure and trustworthy approaches needed to build up detailed pictures, whilst still preserving privacy, of how such factors affect individuals, their homes and households so that new approaches, services and policies can be developed to improve people's lives.

The UK is home to a wide variety of different types of data, often with similar data held in different forms which makes bringing them together difficult. This programme will develop tools and approaches to bring that data together in standardised ways so that it is easier to use in health-related research, allowing researchers to work at larger scale and breadth to unlock new opportunities to improve health and wellbeing in the UK, for example through improving how new drugs and other approaches are tested through clinical trials.

Big Data for Complex Disease focuses on bringing together different types of information about patients to better understand opportunities to improve health care through the prediction, diagnosis, treatment or even prevention of complex disease. The work will initially focus on cancer and cardiovascular disease (CVD) the complex diseases responsible for the majority of disease and death in the UK and globally (CVD includes a range of disease such as heart attacks, strokes and Arrhythmia). This programme will use data from the whole UK population (60-65 million people), providing new tools and opportunities to understand how complex diseases effect each other and how peoples characteristics impact the chance of getting and outcomes of these diseases. This challenge will be an opportunity to bring experts in these different diseases types together and work as a team to improve patient care.

Bringing together health related data and enabling researchers to improve people’s lives will require teamwork with experts across the UK. As it stands, the amount of variation in where and how health related information is stored is a significant obstacle to this game changing research. The Alliance has been active since 2019, bringing together NHS data holders, Universities, charities and industrial partners to identify common challenges and work together to enable better use of data. In the next five years Alliance membership will be extended to non data custodians and complementary groups, including Trade Assocations. Alliance members play a central role in informing HDR UK’s activities in both building and improving the foundations to support health data research, enabling researchers to work in trustworthy ways across organisations and sources of health data, enabling research that has been impossible until now.