There is increasing interest in care pathways for acute exacerbations of disease, which are safe but avoid hospital admission. A virtual ward is a system where people who may otherwise be admitted to hospital receive hospital-led care in their home with observations and reviews conducted remotely by a specialist team. A virtual ward for COPD exacerbations has been recommended by NHS England, promoted following a rapid evaluation report published in 2022 and a number of small studies. To support the evaluation of this new service, PIONEER has developed a highly granular dataset of 6,973 Respiratory Virtual Ward admissions. The data includes demography, serial physiology, assessments, diagnostic codes (ICD-10 & SNOMED-CT), initial presentation, presenting symptoms, Imaging, Prescriptions, Ward locations and outcomes including mortality, readmissions and out patient follow up. The current dataset includes admissions from January 2019 to December 2023.

Geography: The West Midlands (WM) has a population of 6 million & includes a diverse ethnic & socio-economic mix. UHB is one of the largest NHS Trusts in England, providing direct acute services & specialist care across four hospital sites, with 2.2 million patient episodes per year, 2750 beds & > 120 ITU bed capacity. UHB runs a fully electronic healthcare record (EHR) (PICS; Birmingham Systems), a shared primary & secondary care record (Your Care Connected) & a patient portal “My Health”.

Data set availability: Data access is available via the PIONEER Hub for projects which will benefit the public or patients. This can be by developing a new understanding of disease, by providing insights into how to improve care, or by developing new models, tools, treatments, or care processes. Data access can be provided to NHS, academic, commercial, policy and third sector organisations. Applications from SMEs are welcome. There is a single data access process, with public oversight provided by our public review committee, the Data Trust Committee. Contact pioneer@uhb.nhs.uk or visit www.pioneerdatahub.co.uk for more details.

Available supplementary data: Matched controls; ambulance and community data. Unstructured data (images). We can provide the dataset in OMOP and other common data models and can build synthetic data to meet bespoke requirements.

Available supplementary support: Analytics, model build, validation & refinement; A.I. support. Data partner support for ETL (extract, transform & load) processes. Bespoke and “off the shelf” Trusted Research Environment (TRE) build and run. Consultancy with clinical, patient & end-user and purchaser access/ support. Support for regulatory requirements. Cohort discovery. Data-driven trials and “fast screen” services to assess population size.