PIONEER: Health Data Research Hub for Acute Care

PIONEER is the Health Data Research Hub for Acute Care, led by the University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, in partnership with West Midlands Ambulance Service. Acute care is the provision of unplanned medical care; from out of hours primary care, ambulance assessment, emergency medicine, surgery and intensive care. Demand for acute health services are currently unsustainable for our national healthcare resource and this has been particularly highlighted in first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, there has been less innovation in acute care than in many others health sectors, in part due to siloed information about patients with acute illnesses.

PIONEER is changing this, by linking patient data from individual healthcare providers to understand, for the first time, the health journeys people undertake when they are suddenly unwell. The PIONEER Hub collects and curates individually linked acute care data from across the health economy, including primary, secondary, social care, and ambulance data. PIONEER uses this data to:

• provide accurate, real-time data for capacity planning and service innovation,

• support learning healthcare systems including better use of current/novel investigations, treatments and pathways,

• map innovation need.

Ultimately, PIONEER enables stakeholders to develop, test, and deliver new ways of caring for acutely unwell people, supported with expert patient, health care professional, and compute/analytic services.