About
Built by VUIT Data Labs
VUIT Data Labs is a UK data company based at Keele University, working on population health and integrated public data. CDP applies that work to a narrower question: what would it take for an NHS Trust to own its own canonical data repository outright?
- Integrated public datasets in VUIT
- 150+
- University Science Park base
- Keele
- Registered company since
- 2008
- CDP licence
- BSL 1.1
Why we built CDP
Our day-to-day work is bringing large numbers of public datasets into one interoperable shape so that people can actually ask questions across them. That work makes one thing obvious very quickly: the hard part is never the dashboard. It is the model underneath, and who controls it.
Trusts are being asked to place operational data into national platforms while the terms of exit, and the ownership of the derived model, remain genuinely unclear to the people signing. Our view is straightforward — a Trust should hold a complete, canonical copy of its own data, in its own tenancy, in a model that anyone can read.
CDP is our attempt to show that this is buildable now, on the model the NHS already publishes, and to give it away under a source-available licence that means no one can take it back.
From the founder
Adam Townsend is the founder of VUIT Data Labs and the architect of CDP. With more than thirteen years working inside and around the NHS — as a Care Specialist, Trust Specialist and Improvement Consultant — he has spent his career watching operational decisions fail because the data underneath them was fragmented, inaccessible, or owned somewhere else.
That experience shaped VUIT.online, where his team brings together more than 150 public datasets into one interoperable shape so clinicians, analysts and leaders can ask questions across populations rather than across silos. CDP is the next step: a Trust-owned, source-available canonical data repository built on the published NHS Canonical Data Model, designed for organisations that want the analytical power of a proprietary federated platform without surrendering control of their data.
Adam is also the author of Hard Reset — How to build a new NHS that’s not a patch on the old one. His view is direct: the NHS analytics market is overpriced and underperforming, and the only durable fix is to give Trusts the tools to build, audit and move their own canonical data estate.
Connect on LinkedInAdam Townsend
Chief Executive Officer
- Founder, VUIT Data Labs
- Newcastle-under-Lyme / Keele Science Park
The team
Adam Townsend
Chief Executive Officer
Kirsty Townsend
Chief Financial Officer
James Pratt
Chief Data and Information Officer
Graham Westgate
Chief Customer Officer
Claire Higgins
Operations & Customer Relations
John Elsby
Data Scientist and Lead Analyst
How we intend to make a living
CDP is source-available under BSL 1.1: free for evaluation, development, testing and training, with a paid licence for each production instance. Implementation, support, CDM currency and assurance are services a Trust can buy from us or from anyone else — precisely because nothing about the platform is locked to a single supplier.
Next step
See it before you commit to anything
Open the synthetic sandbox to see the canonical model, the FHIR API and the pathway analytics working — or request evaluation access to the reference build itself.