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Revolutionising NHS Data with the Federated Data Platform: What Works, What's Missing, and What the Data Community Can Do About It
The NHS is the seventh largest organisation in the world, serving 56 million people across more than 220 Trusts. The Federated Data Platform is the first serious attempt to give all of those organisations a shared data infrastructure and a common language for their data.
Most people who encounter FDP assume it is an analytics platform. It is not. FDP is designed primarily as an operational platform where clinicians, managers, and administrators make decisions and take actions directly on the data, with analytics as a secondary benefit. I call this approach "Frontline-First." It is a fundamental departure from how the NHS has traditionally thought about data platforms, and it has implications for every DAMA discipline: not just governance, but data architecture, data quality, master data management, metadata, and stewardship.
The reason this works at all is that the platform couples a canonical data model with consistent tooling. A shared data model on its own does not give semantic consistency. It has to be paired with a platform that presents the data to users in the same way at every NHS organisation. That combination of model and tooling is what makes a product built in Dorset deployable in Newcastle without rewriting code. It is also what makes the data management challenge genuinely novel: this is not a familiar data warehousing problem with a governance layer on top.
KEY OUTCOMES
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of:
- What FDP is and why it matters. A brief introduction to the Federated Data Platform for those unfamiliar: what it does, who uses it, and why the NHS built it.
- What "Frontline-First" means: why FDP is an operational platform first and an analytical platform second, and why this challenges the traditional assumption that you do not change the data in the data warehouse. FDP does exactly that, deliberately, and it creates data management questions that the profession has not had to answer before.
- What the FDP ontology is, how it differs from the data science definition of an ontology, and why the combination of a canonical data model with consistent platform tooling is what delivers semantic consistency, not either one in isolation.
- How the data model is governed: the operational governance of the live CDM within the platform, and the expert reference groups developing the formal national CDM. What each contributes, and what is missing between them.
- Why CDM alignment matters for health technology companies building products for the NHS, and what it means in practice for data product design.
- How the DAMA community can help. Every DAMA member in England is also an NHS patient. The quality of their care increasingly depends on the quality of this data model, and the data management profession has directly relevant expertise to contribute.
Tom Bartlett is founder of Bartlett Data Ltd and a member of the DAMA UK community who holds the CDMP credential. He has more than 22 years of NHS experience spanning trust-level and national programme delivery. Until March 2026 he served as Deputy Director of Data Engineering at NHS England, where he led the 150-person team responsible for building and scaling the NHS Federated Data Platform. Before that he held senior data leadership roles at NHS trust level, building data platforms and implementing data governance frameworks grounded in the DAMA body of knowledge. He chairs the NHS Data Engineering Community and now works independently, advising NHS organisations and health technology companies on data strategy, FDP adoption, and data architecture.
