About KeRNEL

The KeRNEL is a new linked dataset currently being developed by the Kent and Medway Data Warehouse team, led by the Kent and Medway Shared Health and Care Analytics Board (SHcAB). Our aspiration for the KeRNEL is to develop the most detailed patient-level linked dataset in the UK for planning and research purposes, locally owned and developed in Kent and Medway. This will ultimately help to reduce inequalities and unwarranted variation in outcomes, which are identified as key areas for improvement in the NHS Long Term Plan. All data brought together in the KeRNEL will be to support this key aim.

The development of the KeRNEL began in 2019. It follows on from the Kent Integrated Dataset (KID) built by the Kent and Medway Data Warehouse team (then the Kent and Medway Health Informatics Service) in 2013 and updated until 2019. The KeRNEL will make several important advances from the KID:

• Where we have ethics approval, we will be able to, on an individual basis, re-identify patients to intervene in their current condition;

• We will aim to include much more clinical data to expand the range of analysis possibilities – for example, we aim to link data on blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels and create scores alongside ICD-10 and OPCS4 codes (standardised coding systems for classifying medical diagnoses and procedures);

• We will have a strategy to consolidate relevant metrics for the ‘wider determinants of health’ to put alongside the outcome data we collect.

Our aim to link in with data on the wider determinants of health sets the KeRNEL apart from other linked datasets that have been developed in Kent and Medway. Given the complexity and variety of datasets in our scope, the KeRNEL’s development will be phased and will start in 2022 with integration of data from local NHS providers, including NHS trusts and GP practices.

See here for further information on the ongoing development of the KeRNEL.

The Kent and Medway Shared Health & Care Analytics Board (SHcAB) is chaired by Dr Marc Farr, Chief Analytical Officer at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust.

As part of the management of the KeRNEL, the SHcAB has set up several working groups around research, workforce development, analytics, partnership working, collaborative research and development, and data quality and assurance. Working groups and sub-committees are summarised in the SHcAB Terms of Reference.

More recently, a regular Information Governance & Data Access group has been set up to consider new data linkage and access requests for population health analytics, including research. This group is chaired by Dr Abraham P. George, Assistant Director of Public Health at Kent County Council and Caldicott Guardian for the SHcAB.