We asked, “what are the tasks that people who use data for the benefit of the health and care system do?” and started coming up with various categories of people and their expertise. For example, data skills, technology proficiency and clinical knowledge. From there, we were able to get to some large categories of users, such as clinical and clerical staff, analysts and data specialists, scientists and researchers, and policy and service planners and decision makers.

But even this didn’t help as much as we expected. These user groups tended to crop up across the services we were seeking to understand. They had very different and discrete needs depending on where we encountered them.

Similar users were coming from a wide variety of different organisations, from academic research institutions, to service providers and commercial entities, and they needed different things from us depending on their task rather than necessarily on their roles and competencies. It wasn’t as simple as clinical and clerical staff needing one set of things from us, and academics needing something else.