Who else is doing RAP
RAP was borne from the academic principle of reproducible research and is adapted to allow others producing insight from data to benefit from increased transparency, reuse and resilience in their analytical pipelines.
RAP is being done across a range of organisation ion health and care.
NHS England perspective
NHS England has begun its journey to RAP for all our analytical outputs. The aim is to get all publications to 'baseline RAP' though some of our publications are more mature than this already.
Some benefits already seen are: less reliance on proprietary software, more reuse of code and faster publication production.
Useful links, including our excellent community of practice pages, are here:
RAP community of practice website
RAP community of practice repo
NHS England RAP package template
Other code from NHS England analytics services
Publication RAP repos are listed here
Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) perspective
The size and maturity of the analysis function in DHSC has increased over the last three years, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and again upon the absorption of the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities (OHID) into the department. OHID brought with it a large and mature analytical operation as well as greater responsibility for published statistics.
DHSC analysts access platforms owned by NHS and UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) for purposes of working with agreed data under specific use cases. Following the Data Saves Lives strategy recommendation that "DHSC develop its internal infrastructure for hosting, using and disseminating aggregate and non-personal datasets"; DHSC is now working to develop new platforms and improve existing ones with the intention these support the adoption of RAP.
While DHSC have mostly internal RAP products, with the creation of OHID now also have responsibility for publicly available tooling such as fingertips. Sections of the underlying data pipeline of fingertips have been published as packages, and are widely used beyond the department. DHSC continues to increase its training provision for the use and analysis of data and has recently doubled the size of its dedicated central Data Science Hub. The Hub is currently developing further RAP tooling to help develop, implement and manage RAPs across the department's analytical community.
Forward look
Currently DHSC's key activities are infrastructure development and tooling to support RAP. Concurrently with this development we will lay the groundwork for a strategic approach with pilots to understand our data flows allowing us to rationalise, standardise and catalogue the pipelines with a view to efficient implementation, cataloguing and maintenance. As these workstreams mature we will turn to realising and demonstrating benefits of RAP through implementation, engagement, training and evaluation.
UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) perspective
At UKHSA, we are committed to increasing the uptake of RAP across our analytical community and in meeting the goals of the wider government RAP strategy.
Work is ongoing to develop and change our data and analytical platforms to make them more ready for RAP. We are also hard at work promoting a better awareness and understanding of RAP, and encouraging a greater readiness and motivation for the uptake of RAP across the agency.
How to let others find your work
Topics are a great way to tag your work and find others for example reproducible-analytical-pipeline