Speaking at Ovum’s Smart to Future City Forum, Ian Jones, Smart City Lead at the City of Leeds, highlighted the ambitions of the city is to create a citizen and data driven healthcare program for its aging population.

Using a strategy based on digital innovation and open data, the team are in the process of bridging the £600 million gap in budgets to meet the demands of an aging population. The ambition of the city is to create a programme which enables digital thinking in a health system which could be seen as bulky, un-responsive and limited.

“Open data gives us a view on how the city operates,” said Jones. “It allows customers to see data, understand the situation, raise questions and allows us to use the data to encourage innovators to help us solve the cities problems. How we use the data is driven entirely from the community. This is where the value is driven from.”

Bringing together the five trusts in Leeds, the city’s first challenge is to bring together the trusts on one public services network, to increase collaboration and integration, and achieve what the city is describing as citizen driven health. Ultimately the team are driving towards the concept of citizens managing their own health through a digital model and open data infrastructure.

The concept itself it fundamentally built out of the citizens needs themselves. After an initial consultation process with the citizens themselves, the team have driven a number of different initiatives from transportation challenges for an aging population, poor air quality within the city to diabetes management.

Through the deployment of various IoT devices throughout the city, the Leeds Data Mill acts as an open data hub to enable the citizens themselves to drive innovation in the city. Using this concept, the team aim to add value to the overall population by taking ideas from the citizens themselves, as opposed to dictating what is good for them. This in itself is the concept of citizen driven health.