Blockchain Digital Consent

Using Blockchain Technology, a digital consent service is being developed for the exchange of patient data across electronic health records in an integrated care setting. High levels of encryption allow information to be shared securely with consent, and audit records stored on a “Blockchain” to ensure compliance with information governance rules. Patients using this consent mechanism will be able to actively control how they share their data, and approve or refuse (case-by-case), from a mobile app. This approach puts the patient at the heart of all data sharing relationships, giving them full transparency over who has access to their data. It will also help to create a more informed picture of the patient with a shared virtual health record, helping clinicians and patients to better manage complex and long-term conditions. In addition, the technology will also improve efficiency; cutting the overheads of more labour-intensive approaches to sharing information and managing consent. The work is a collaboration of WMG and healthcare software experts at Dovetail Lab on ‘General Practice of the Future.

Federated Collaborative Care Cure Cloud Architecture for Addressing the Needs of multi-morbidity and Managing Poly-Pharmacy – C3 Cloud

C3-Cloud establishes an ICT infrastructure enabling a collaborative care and cure cloud to enable continuous coordination of patient-centred care activities by a multidisciplinary care team and patients/informal care givers. A Personalised Care Plan Development Platform allowing, for the first time, collaborative creation and execution of personalised care plans for multi-morbid patients through systematic and semi-automatic reconciliation of clinical guidelines, with the help of Decision Support Modules for risk prediction and stratification, recommendation reconciliation, poly-pharmacy management and goal setting. Pilots have been operating for 15 months in 3 European regions with diverse health and social care systems and ICT landscape, allowing for strengthening the evidence base on health outcomes and efficiency gains. C3-Cloud adaptive patient pathways and organisational models validated by patient organisations and a clinical reference group, change management and training guidelines will be shared with the European community. http://c3-cloud.eu/

Comprehensive Unified Research (CURe)

The objective of the CURe framework and associated web applications is to develop a new approach to get researchers in different specialties to start thinking of prospective studies and what data they need to collect that would be useful to them and their colleagues. Common data elements to all medical areas, as well as specialist requirements can be handled by the framework. The standardisation of data elements to promote interoperability and reuse has been introduced. Semantic Interoperability through coding systems is supported. For this work a Terminology and Vocabulary Service is used.

Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) – Midlands Substantive Site

The Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG, at the University of Warwick, is a key partner in the Midlands site helping to deliver a £30 million project by Health Data Research UK, to address challenging UK healthcare issues using data science, which is looking at making game-changing improvements in people’s health by harnessing data science at scale across the UK.

Our ‘HDR UK Substantive Site’ project represents an integrated vision from leading research and clinical care organisations in the Midlands. It brings together Universities and University Hospital NHS partners of Birmingham (Coordinator), Leicester, Nottingham and Warwick building on a platform of excellence in informatics and data science and a track record of cross-institutional collaboration. Our vision responds directly to the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy and in so doing, to challenges for research and healthcare that can be addressed by utilising the unique opportunities emerging from a digital NHS. We will develop and evaluate analytical approaches to address the integration of multimodal, multi-dimensional, patient-level, healthcare data, generating a trusted research platform that acquires, represents, and processes large, multi-dimensional and distributed research data to generate novel means by which to improve diagnosis, refine prognosis and personalise treatment. We offer a new and distinctive approach to connect institutions and fields of expertise in scientific and technological development, to realise value from existing data assets and to create new assets which will address important scientific questions and transform healthcare delivery.

We will address three primary challenges complementary to HDR UK’s ambitions and strategy through cross-site, multidisciplinary expertise and NHS partnership:

• Making NHS data (in particular secondary care data) far more useable for research

• Making NHS and biobank data safely and comprehensively discoverable for research

• Developing, evaluating and applying appropriate analytical tools to NHS data in real time to inform decision making and improve health for patients and populations

Tommy’s Net: National Clinical Database for the Tommy’s National Centre for Early Miscarriage Research

The initiative is part of the Tommy’s National Centre for Early Miscarriage Care and Research (NEMC) which is the first in the UK - and the largest in Europe. The University of Warwick has been chosen as a partner, together with the University of Birmingham and Imperial College London. The NEMC is funded by Tommy's, the baby and pregnancy charity. An online electronic patient record system will be designed and constructed by IDH which will link into three Tommy’s Centres (in Coventry, Birmingham and London). The clinical details and histories of women attending the centres will be entered or uploaded from existing hospital systems into the collaborative online system. It is expected to take fewer than two years to assemble the initial tranche of data. At the same time the University of Warwick’s researchers will be joining doctors from University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire to investigate the causes of early miscarriage.

Tommy’s Reproductive Health Biobank

The Tommy's Reproductive Health Biobank aims to facilitate researchers in reproductive health to move the field from one of excellent science and excellent pragmatic trials to a precision medicine focussed field, where women at high risk of complications can be given appropriate care and new effective interventions can be developed. Tommy's four centres of excellence include research teams from Edinburgh, Manchester, King College London, Imperial, Birmingham and Warwick, who all have the ability to obtain detailed mechanistic information from tissue samples using techniques including sequencing of DNA, RNA in whole tissues, RNA sequencing in single cells, DNA methylation gene reads, and proteomics. Clinical phenotyping in-terms of past history and importantly future pregnancy, neonatal and infant outcomes is needed to facilitate translation of this scientific excellence to patient benefit.

West Midlands Health Informatics Network

The aim of the network is to support functions in designing, developing, deploying and evaluating health informatics solutions in healthcare within the West Midlands region. Objectives of the network are but not limited to: encourage and support closer working between academics with an interest in health informatics and NHS; enable closer working between IT professionals and clinicians; establish a forum to discuss and disseminate evidence based practice in health informatics; promote research in health informatics; support establishment of health informatics centre of excellence in West Midlands; support designing of health informatics courses.

www.wmhin.org