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21c Showcases Scotland’s Innovative Use of Data to Improve Health Care at UN Expert Group


For the first time ever, the UN hosted an Expert Group Meeting on ‘Global Ageing and the Data Revolution’ (7-9 July 2015) with an eye to ensuring that Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda capitalizes upon new approaches to gathering and analyzing age related data.

21c President & Founder, Dr. Julia Glidden, was asked to lead a session on the innovative use of new online data tools to enhance data collection, policy making and monitoring. After introducing the way in which crowd sourcing and social media are generating an explosion of new data sources for public administrators across the globe, Julia used the session to feature the Scottish Government’s use of acute patient level data to monitor operational day to day statistics on health as well as to link data for planning and research. In particular, Julia featured Scotland’s use of linked data analysis to assess institutional vs. home health care, improve dementia services and structure anticipatory care.

Participants in the Expert Meeting expressed a universal need to make better use of existing data, improve data sharing across departments and organisations and better engage citizens in data collection. Scotland’s focus on using data from the patient through to the community level to achieve its 20/20 Vision to deliver integrated health and social care – whilst entirely new to the Expert Group – represented a timely and well received contribution to the discussion.


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