Healthcare Analytics for Birmingham and Solihull ICS

Birmingham and Solihull ICS covers a population of approximately 1.3 million people across one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Europe. University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is one of the largest NHS Trusts in the UK, operating the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham — the largest hospital in the country by volume, with more than 1,200 beds and over one million patient contacts per year. The QE is also the site of the UK's leading liver transplant, burns, and trauma services, attracting tertiary and quaternary referrals from across the Midlands and beyond. The scale of clinical activity at UHB creates data management demands that test the limits of conventional NHS analytics infrastructure: millions of clinical codes, diagnostic records, and outcome data points must be processed, linked, and reported annually against national benchmarks through the Model Hospital framework and Secondary Uses Service.

Birmingham has the highest proportion of South Asian residents of any major UK city — including large Punjabi, Gujarati, Mirpuri, and Bangladeshi communities — creating specific population health analytics requirements. Type 2 diabetes prevalence among South Asian populations in Birmingham significantly exceeds the national average, with elevated cardiovascular disease risk, earlier onset, and different pharmacogenomic profiles demanding population segmentation analytics that general NHS cohort tools cannot provide. Birmingham Women's and Children's NHS Foundation Trust serves the city's extraordinarily young population — Birmingham's median age of 31 makes it the youngest major city in Europe — with paediatric, neonatal, and maternal health analytics demands that reflect both the volume and complexity of services. The NHS elective recovery backlog in the Midlands adds further pressure: UHB and Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust together face significant waiting lists across orthopaedics, cardiology, and general surgery.

NHS Birmingham and Solihull ICS organisations are governed by NHS England's Midlands region, with CQC providing independent inspection and quality assurance across all provider types. University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust — as one of England's largest Teaching Trusts — has specific NICE guideline compliance obligations across its specialist clinical programmes, as well as national data submission requirements to clinical registries including the National Liver Offering Scheme and the Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN).

Birmingham and Solihull ICS must produce a Joint Forward Plan aligned to NHS England's planning guidance, with population health analytics underpinning the ICS's formal responsibilities under the Health and Care Act 2022. NHS organisations submit data to the Secondary Uses Service and the Model Hospital benchmarking portal, and must comply with the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit. The adjacent Black Country ICS creates cross-boundary patient flow data requirements — particularly for specialist services at UHB — that necessitate inter-ICS data sharing agreements under NHS England's guidance on ICS collaboration.