Innovative Practices Award for NHS England, IQVIA Privacy Protection Platform
By Irene Yeh
July 23, 2025 | To support patient privacy while providing data accessibility for organizations, the National Health Service (NHS) England with IQVIA developed NHS PET (Privacy Enhancing Technology) as a secure, scalable solution for patient data. The work earned NHS and IQVIA one of four Innovative Practices Awards at this year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo—an honor the judges christened the “Respect the Patient Award”.
The NHS provides publicly funded healthcare for all UK residents and has a wide range of services and programs. This produces large volumes of data, and the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), a digital transformation project that brings together data from separate systems across NHS organizations in England, provides staff an accessible, secure resource for information. Because of the amount of patient data constantly being accessed and used, privacy and security are top priorities.
This is where NHS PET comes in. PET is designed to provide a standard approach to enabling safe data access and use across the NHS in England, as well as ensure public confidence and put data to work for improvements in healthcare. NHS PET will anonymize or pseudonymize sensitive parts of data while preserving analytics usefulness and enhancing transparency by offering a clear audit trail of all data it transforms, ensuring accountability and trust in data handling.
The platform was designed with privacy, trust, interoperability, and transparency in mind. According to Jonathan Green, director of privacy analytics, Europe at IQVIA, the platform also provides standardization to reduce risk of inconsistent data assets and operational cost; separation of powers to ensure that data privacy and governance technology are operated independently of the data analytics platform; and security to maintain healthcare-specific security controls and features aligned to best practice standards for healthcare technology.
“Innovation and driving healthcare forward to improve outcomes for patients were the key drivers behind the project,” said David O’Callaghan, director of data platforms at NHS England. “And with patients’ interests a critical driver, security and the protection of people’s personal data is at the heart of the design and requirement of the NHS Federated Data Platform.”
Ensuring Privacy and Security—And Accessibility
Since its launch in November 2023, the NHS PET solution has been configured from an instance of IQVIA’s Privacy Analytics technology. The tool is being adopted to support specific NHS England needs with analysis by the IQVIA product team to understand the use cases and to ensure that any new functionality required informs future releases, Green explained. By January 2025, the PET Dataset Catalogue audited the activity over 22,000 datasets with over ten million registrations from the NHS FDP.
Green also explained that NHS PET can be “utilized within a rigorous information governance framework and will be a key enabler for the NHS in England to achieve its wider data sharing and analytics ambitions, maximizing outcomes for patients and care providers.” For example, if a team is analyzing data which has been pseudonymized, with the right information governance and legal permissions, “NHS PET tooling could be utilized by local NHS organisations in England to safely re-identify those patients to respond to their healthcare needs.”
O’Callaghan emphasized that “building relationships, sharing awareness, and articulating the benefits of the new platform” are crucial to building confidence. “Continuous improvement of the NHS PET solution is ongoing within NHS England,” added Green.
The team will continue to integrate PET across key platforms within the NHS in England, which will reduce reliance and eventually retire legacy solutions. The team is also in the process of developing and deploying a local access model that can allow individual NHS organizations to use the tool independently of the national team.