About Promptly Health
Promptly Health partners with healthcare organisations and life science companies to provide real-world evidence to inform healthcare solutions.
The partnership will help Newcastle Hospitals to organise and catalogue our data to engage in high-quality research and innovation.
By harmonising datasets to common standards and making them accessible, insights and new knowledge can be drawn out to generate information about outcomes of care.
The partnership provides better quality data to enable improvements to healthcare.
You can find more information about Promptly Health’s work and their partnerships with the NHS.
What data insights will be shared?
Information that may be shared with Promptly Health could include:
- High level information about you, including age, gender, ethnicity and the area you live.
- Information about your illness and treatment.
- Information from tests and scans.
All reference to your full name, date of birth and full address will be removed during the process and before any access is given to Promptly Health.
Who else may have access to the data?
Promptly Health will create standardised data from our information, that will be useful to researchers.
Through cataloguing and storing collated data in one place, packages of relevant data can be provided to organisations involved in developing new care and treatment options.
Information can also be provided to answer specific research questions.
All patient identifiable information will be removed before Promptly have access to the data, so your privacy will always remain protected.
Promptly Health will only provide results of data analysis to people and companies who are using the information for healthcare purposes.
No insurance or marketing companies will have access to the data.
Will researchers have to pay to access the data?
Promptly Health will charge commercial organisations for providing analysis from the data sets. Income generated from this will be shared with Newcastle Hospitals to invest in research projects and to improve care.
The partnership with Promptly Health UK does not cost Newcastle Hospitals any money.
How will your data will be protected?
Only information needed for research will be shared and there will be strict controls on access to this data. These controls are a legal requirement, which also apply to how your data is used, and will be closely followed by anyone involved in the work.
Your privacy and confidentiality are extremely important. Your data will always be stored, shared and processed securely.
Newcastle Hospitals will remove your personal details including name, address and date of birth from data before access is shared with Promptly Health UK.
How to opt out
You have a right to choose whether your data is shared for research.
If you do not wish for your data to be used for research you can opt-out using the national data opt out service. However, this will result in opting out of using your data for all NHS research and planning uses, not just from this project.
Any patient who has registered on the national data opt out will automatically be excluded from our work with Promptly Health UK.
If you opt-out at any time, data collected on your care from that point onwards will not be included.
Summary
– Your identifiable personal data is never shared and doesn’t leave Newcastle Hospitals’ systems.
– Promptly Health works with pseudonymised health data within the Newcastle Hospitals’ secure environment, and only approved outputs or insights are made available for research purposes under the hospitals’ governance.
– Pseudonymised health data is health information where identifying details are replaced with a code. This means the data does not directly identify an individual.
In simple terms:
• Names, NHS numbers and contact details are removed or replaced (for example, “Patient 12345”)
• Health information, such as diagnoses, test results and dates, is retained
• Access to any information that could reconnect the data to an individual is strictly controlled and limited to authorised staff within Newcastle Hospitals
Why data insights are used:
• Enables researchers and analysts to use health data insights safely and responsibly
• Significantly improves privacy compared to using fully identifiable information
• All data processing takes place in line with NHS information governance standards and UK data protection law.
