APPG for Longevity invites contributions to the Open Life Data Framework – aims to make it easier to collect and connect data to help people stay healthier for longer and reduce health inequalities.
The UK’s All-Parliamentary Group for Longevity (APPGL) is today inviting contributions to the Open Life Data Framework, which will propose how to collect and harness the data needed to develop personal, population and pandemic resilience solutions.
The Open Life Data Framework is a recommendation from the APPGL’s report, The Health of the Nation Strategy, which set out key recommendations to meet the government goal of five more years of healthy life expectancy by 2035, while reducing health inequalities.
The framework will help researchers, policymakers and entrepreneurs determine what types of data can be shared and connected to help individuals keep healthy while enhancing overall health resilience at a population health level. It will explore how the exposome of complex exposures from multiple determinants of health (such as diet, housing, air quality, physical activity, and social interactions) can advance healthy longevity research and practice.
The principles and methodology of Open Banking will be applied to make health and non-health data useful at scale, taking learnings from the finance model.
This insight will guide the development of ethical, trusted solutions designed to meet the five more years of healthy life goal, develop use cases for innovators and entrepreneurs, and inform the value of UK health data assets to feed into UK economic strategy and its global ambition to lead in science and AI.
Use cases are being sought as part of the consultation, but three have been selected initially to identify the key barriers to wider data sharing and provide insight into the data value chain, potential benefits and harms, and areas for further investigation:
- Digital Redbook for Life, which focuses on weight management.
- Healthy Ageing Data Exchange, which combines data including epigenetic and shopping data to identify the behaviours that advance healthy longevity and drive healthier consumer choices.
- Civic Data Cooperatives, which is a national grid of health action-research to mobilise trustworthy data uses into actions that benefit the local public’s health, social fabric and economy.
The group, comprising 45 experts, is chaired by Lord James O’Shaughnessy, former Undersecretary of Health and visiting professor at Imperial College, and directed by Gavin Starks, CEO of Dgen, and co-architect of the Open Banking standard and Tina Woods, Director, APPG for Longevity.
