UKCloud Health help Imperial College NHS Trust harness the value of sensitive data to deliver

Speaking at London Tech Week recently, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that the NHS should embrace a wider use of technology and data to help save lives. He added that the UK must ensure that the data architecture of the NHS was “interoperable” and high quality enough so that it “protects privacy whilst allowing for research and allowing the use of that data to find insights and then apply them in a clinical setting”. All with the goal of helping to save lives and improve people’s health.

As a timely example of this goal, Imperial College NHS Trust engaged UKCloud Health to support the initial proof of concept project called Imperial Clinical Analytics, Research and Evaluation (iCARE), which was scoped and started in January 2020. iCARE provides researchers with access to de-identified data and tooling that allows them to perform a whole range of complex analytics - from simple regression through to advanced machine learning and AI. Data security and protection was of utmost importance to Imperial College so they needed to work with a partner they could trust to uphold data protection and provide robust security. Acquiring patient consent for their clinical data was a lengthy process and Imperial College did not want to jeopardise that by placing it in a global cloud operated by a US provider - a prudent decision given the recent Court of Justice judgement invalidating the adequacy of the Privacy Shield EU-US data protection agreement.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck and rather than pause all the work done to date, Imperial College NHS Trust took a strategic decision in combination with eight North West London Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), to create a programme called Whole Systems Integrated Care. This unique data set covers a 2.5 million population and links primary, secondary, community, social and mental health care altogether. It provides a sector-wide solution to allow fast processing of data, including new data feeds, to help to understand COVID-19 and North West London’s clinical, operational and research needs.

The COVID NWL Data Prioritisation Group was brought together from experts across the sector to rapidly and agilely provide access to the data for researchers and other priority users. Imperial College NHS Trust curated an overall dataset for all patients to enable 25 approved projects across 46 researchers.

This data analytics environment enabled them to get a handle on the acuity of the patients in the hospital at any one time to help them best align resources against demand of patients coming in to A&E – oxygen support devices, CPAP, criticality of patients etc. The value of timely analysis of data at this point was enormous and critical to improving patient outcomes.

Mr Erik Mayer, Clinical Senior Lecturer from the Surgery & Technology BRC Theme, and Transformation Chief Clinical Information Officer (ICHNT), commended the effort: “I am very grateful for the huge collaborative effort in making this a reality during these challenging times. This provides a further exciting opportunity to use data-driven insights into healthcare delivery for the benefit of the North West London population.’’

UKCloud Health brings together the people, partners and platform to reduce the time, cost and risk of advancing an organisation’s digital maturity.

“UKCloud Health works with all types of organisations in the health and care sector and recognises that whilst some organisations are highly mature like Imperial College NHS Trust, many organisations are still near the beginning of their journey and first need to focus on ‘getting the basics right’ by creating a cost effective, sustainable and resilient digital foundation for their IT services.’’ said David Price, Director of UKCloud Health

To meet this varying need, UKCloud Health offers four key services and solutions which can help organisations in the health and care sector realise the value of their data:

Discovery – UKCloud Health is currently offering a free discovery workshop which can build the case for a full data assessment service – these advisory services help organisations understand the value of the data they hold, how it should be protected (digital resilience) and how it could be nurtured to be better exploited.

Sovereign Hosting – Public or private cloud environments hosted within the UK government-grade Crown Campus (or on-premises, or both) which create a UK owned and operated digital infrastructure on which to host the UK’s most sensitive and valuable datasets.

Repatriate – A combined cost optimisation and data assessment service that determines the best mix of cloud services to deliver value-for-money without compromising on compliance, connectivity, and independence.

Protect – A cloud-hosted cyber security service that monitors all your IT systems (from on-premises to public cloud), all the time, ensuring you can identify suspicious activity and commit the appropriate response before an event becomes an incident.