Health Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP) Playbook

ALPHA Please note that this website is currently in alpha testing. As such, you may encounter bugs, errors, or inaccuracies during your visit. Your feedback is invaluable in helping us improve this site.

This website documents processes, tools and technologies used in health when creating Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP)

It is intended to complement, not replace, existing UK Government and NHS guidance:

• The cross-government big picture on RAP: Government Analysis Function RAP Strategy
• The cross-government RAP community and guidance: Government Analysis Function RAP Guidance
• Guidance on how to set up a RAP squad and train others in RAP: NHS England RAP Community of Practice
• Other RAP-related guidance:
• Quality Assurance of Code for Analysis and Research (Duck book)
• NHS Software Engineering Quality Framework
• Turing Way: A handbook to reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science
• Why open source is important:
• Cabinet office - Be open and use open source
• NHS open source digital playbook

Who this is for

• Analysts and researchers using health data who want to adopt RAP
• Analyst leaders in health who want to support or encourage RAP adoption
• IT, cyber, and Information Governance professionals who want to ensure RAP is applied safely to health data
• Members of the public who want to understand how their data is processed to provide insights into health and care

How to use this playbook

In our initial release we have focussed on guidance for those who have organisational buy-in and are looking for guidance and best practice on tools and processes:

• How do I do RAP in health – deals with the difficulties of doing RAP when you have sensitive data
• Who else is doing it – links to testimony and resources from other health organisations who are doing RAP
• Exceptions to open sharing of RAP – this discusses situations where it may be necessary not to publish your code
• Levels of RAP maturity – this gives guidance on how to stage your RAP strategy to achieve high value gains early on in your journey

Future releases will contain:

Guidance for those less familiar with RAP. You will probably need to convince someone in your organisation (or yourself) that it’s a good thing to do:

• Why is it important to health – this covers the wider policy ask, and points to the drivers for this work.
• What is RAP in health – this covers why we need RAP in health analytics, key considerations, and misconceptions.

Guidance if you are one of the thousands of analysts working across hundreds of organisations in Trusts, PCNs, and ICBs:

• RAP for ICBs Trusts PCNs – bespoke resources and contacts for those working in smaller local teams