The winner of the Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Healthcare Data Analytics 2021, jointly awarded by the Health Foundation and the Royal Statistical Society, has been announced.
Now in its second year, the award recognises practitioners in applied healthcare data analytics who have gone the extra mile in delivering innovative improvements for the health care system. This year’s award has been given to the COVID-19 Population Risk Assessment team, for their COVID-19 Population Risk Assessment predictive model powered by QCovid.
This cross-organisational team produced QCovid, a predictive mode which combines characteristics such as age, ethnicity, gender and deprivation from a number of national datasets to estimate an individual’s risk of catching and then being hospitalised or dying from COVID-19. QCovid was rolled out over every adult in England and it has been running regularly since March 2020. Thanks to this programme, at-risk adults in England could be identified, prioritised for vaccination and added to the national ‘Shielded Patients List’.
Adam Steventon, director of data analytics at the Health Foundation, said: "The pandemic continues to highlight the critical role that data and analytics increasingly play in protecting and improving the health of everybody in our society. The COVID19 Population Risk Assessment team’s work powerfully demonstrates that high quality analytics can make a real difference to patients' lives on a national scale. The level of collaboration, careful navigation of obstacles and the focus on addressing health inequalities on this project are outstanding."
