An Open Data Portal for the NHS Business Services Authority

6 min read

Key facts

Brief summary of the project.

The project offers a compelling case for how Datopian's cutting-edge solutions enabled the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) to create an efficient and user-friendly Open Data Portal, catering to their vision of improving customer experience and delivering real value.

Problem

The NHSBSA faced the challenge of efficiently managing and sharing vast amounts of health-related data across their organization, while ensuring easy access and discoverability for both internal and external stakeholders. To achieve this, they needed a scalable, user-friendly, and secure open data platform that could handle big data and improve overall data transparency in the healthcare sector.

Need

NHSBSA needed a platform with sufficient storage capacity, an SQL queryable API data endpoint, a data explorer extension for effective filtering and previewing, and a solution for handling large data files to support their commitment to making data freely available.

Solution

We implemented a powerful, tailored CKAN-based open data portal to cater to the NHSBSA's specific requirements. The solution incorporated advanced technologies like BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage for efficient data management and handling of large datasets. Our team developed a user-friendly data explorer extension that enabled effective filtering, previewing, and downloading of resources, even for sizable files. Additionally, a customized data publishing UI allowed for direct uploads to the cloud, streamlining the data publishing process. A zipped upload function was also developed, along with tools for transparent audit trails and output logs of user activities. Our comprehensive solution enhanced the NHSBSA's data discoverability, accessibility, and operational efficiency while promoting transparency and collaboration within the healthcare sector.

Context

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) is an arm’s length body of the Department of Health and Social Care

The NHS Business Services Authority is an Arm’s Length Body of the Department of Health and Social Care which provides a number of support services to the wider National Health Service. It manages over 35 billion pounds of NHS spend annually delivering a range of national services to NHS organisations, NHS contractors, patients and the public. Its purpose is to be a catalyst for better health and its vision is to be the delivery partner of choice for the NHS.

The situation

Being involved in the management of 35 billion pounds worth of NHS spend and having a broad range of services to deliver - from processing data and information to help the NHS run more efficiently and helping digitize more of their services, the NHSBSA was looking for a solution to ensure their Open Data Portal would fulfill their purpose and vision. Before approaching us, they did extensive market research. Datopian came out as a leading provider that could help them shape their data journey.

The criteria

One of NHSBSA’s main priorities was and is to make data freely available to everyone and get as much data out there in the open. Part of their requirements included:

• 500GB of storage for Open Data
• Minimum 2,000 downloads a month, equivalent to 6TB of download traffic out of the solution, in addition to API queries to the datastore for specific resources.
• A public, SQL queryable API data endpoint for each resource, achieved with each flat CSV file ingested into the CKAN datastore effectively. The download / go to resource button on each resource should provide each CSV as a zip to reduce the file size to users downloading it if large.
• A suitable data explorer extension, which gives the ability to filter effectively and preview large resources added to the portal quickly by external users. E.g. preview and return filtered data of 4GB up to approximately 40GB with ease and little lag. With no limit on the number of rows that can be extracted and downloaded from this data preview / filter.

The Solution

Our team has clear, established methodologies for implementing open data projects. And we know very well that in order to be a delivery partner of choice, NHSBSA needs to make sure that their services are improving customer experience, it's easy to work with them, and that they are delivering real value and people can see that.

Currently on the data portal there are 222 total resources (both public and private) across 43 datasets which includes around 1.3 TB of data.

We pulled some statistics: on a random day in July there were over 2000 interactions (APIs, explorer interactions, downloads, etc) or around 150 to 200 GB of data per day. So we’re talking about large volumes of data.

When working with large files, BigQuery is useful and faster. That's why we used BigQuery to replace postgres. We are using Aircan which is Airflow based to load the data. We developed a data publishing UI which is a bit different from the classic one. It allows you to upload data directly to the cloud and then once it's in the file store it gets picked up by the Аirflow and it's pushed to the BigQuery. So basically folks from NHSBSA upload large data files around 5 or 6 GB into the file store directly which is very convenient and much quicker.

The zip upload for resources requirement was solved by creating a script so that a zipped version of the resource can be downloaded along with the standard CSV download. We also developed a data explorer extension which gives the ability to filter effectively and preview large resources with ease and download filtered resources (instead of the whole file).

Outcomes

To mention a few of the services Datopian has provided:

• Customisation of the front end according to the requirements of the client.
• Content architecture work (such as re-organising content to different levels).
• Custom extensions above vanilla CKAN such as data explorer extension which gives the ability to filter effectively and preview large resources with ease and download filtered resources using BigQuery and Google Buckets for data storage.
• Enabled uploads through datapub extension that adds the functionality of uploading tabular data along with editing the schema for BigQuery table for the resource.
• We provided the functionality for the zipped upload of the resources. That allows downloading the zipped version instead of the uncompressed file that saves the user from downloading large files.
• Provided egress details for each NHS storage bucket on the Google cloud platform via an API which allows egress details to be available for the analysis of the data trends for the NHS open data platform.
• Developed tools for transparent audit trail and output logs of user activities on the ODP and stored them in Google cloud storage through a sink for the ODP usage trends analysis.

What’s next?

In the coming years, NHSBSA will be looking to:

• Grow and develop knowledge about user needs including the ability for users to engage with NHSBSA and each other.
• Continue to publish more data from across the NHSBSA.
• Continue to collaborate with other parts of the NHS and outside the NHS.
• Improve the ability to search the datasets across the web.
• Continue to use the portal for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to support the wider NHSBSA around operational efficiency and making more data open.