At Make A Difference Media we’re following with interest the great work of the All Party-Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Longevity, as well as the associated Business for Health business-led coalition of socially responsible employers, purchasers, investors and innovators.
Here’s a summary of progress on the group’s three key projects. These build on their achievements as outlined in the recent Comment piece published in The Lancet.
Open Life Data Framework
The APPG has been awarded funding from the Health Foundation to continue their work to design an Open Life Data Framework to harness data in our lives in solutions that will help us live healthier for longer. More news here.
The Open Life Data framework was a recommendation of The Health of the Nation report. This was published a year ago by the APPG to deliver the UK government’s goal of five extra years of healthy life expectancy while reducing health inequalities (‘HLE+5’).
The framework will help researchers, policymakers and entrepreneurs work out which non-health data (like mobility, consumer, financial, environmental), plus which health data (like medical records) provide the most insight into helping individuals keep healthy while enhancing overall health resilience at a population health level. This aim is that this insight will guide the development of ethical, trusted solutions across the private, public and academic sectors to meet the HLE+5 goal.
The framework will identify strategies to achieve pandemic resilience and develop use cases for innovators and entrepreneurs. It will also inform the value of UK health data assets to feed into UK economic strategy and its global ambition to lead in science and AI.
The principles and methodology of Open Banking will be applied to make health and non-health data useful at scale. At the same time these principles will address regulation, ethics, safety and risk issues of the finance model that has successfully opened up innovation to benefit UK consumers.
Levelling Up Health
Building on The Health of the Nation, the group will be launching their new policy paper in April entitled, Levelling Up Health. The group is now engaging with the top of government about the paper’s core message; that the experience of the pandemic demands a new initiative to improve our health and reduce the great inequalities in health laid bare by Covid-19.
Business Index
The business-led coalition of socially responsible employers, purchasers, investors and innovators called Business for Health was launched in November 2020. It was the result of a recommendation in The Health of the Nation report. The coalition will soon be announcing plans for a Business Index to measure the contribution of business to the nation’s health.
The APPG and the Business for Health coalition is looking for additional supporters and funders to help them to make the most impact as possible with their plans in 2021. If you are keen to help, you can contact Tina Wood at [email protected] and she we will contact you directly to discuss further.
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