A GOSH data scientist’s perspective on a new NHS policy

The GOSH Digital Research Environment (DRE) team is making new software using code every day. We write thousands of lines of code every year. Some of that code helps us set up new ways of sorting and understanding data that can lead to improvements for healthcare staff and services, and the children and young people that we support. Some of them don’t work, and we go back to writing. This is all part of the process.??

The recently published NHS Open Source Policy, provides guidance on when and how developing software should be made available for a more efficient, transparent and integrated health and social care system. Open source means sharing code so that all people that want to improve healthcare through data science can learn from each other. It can also support accountability to the public in the NHS.?

Our team already complies with a lot of this guidance, but the policy will help to clarify how we need to work, especially on the safe sharing of code and how to collaborate with other teams across the NHS. It also has the potential to accelerate our work on the automation of often time-consuming data processing and analysis, which are powered by open source code. These projects are called reproducible analytical pipelines, and they are used across government departments and the NHS .??

Beyond the sharing of code, another key driver of innovation and good practice is a supportive community looking to address the same challenges and opportunities. We’ve found this in the NHS-R Community where we can share our solutions and our issues, and both contribute to and benefit from the collective expertise of fantastic data professionals across the NHS and beyond.???

But this new policy does raise questions for teams like ours. For example, how does code sharing impact on current information governance and ICT policies? And even if code is available to use, how do we know that it will mean the same thing across different hospitals and data environments??

Overall, I welcome this new policy as it sets out a clear direction for open source that GOSH was already embarking on. The GOSH DRE team is small but mighty, and we look forward to using this policy to support changes in practice so we can continue to support improvements in our services through data science.?