Title: Heath Informatics
Funder: Department of Health and Social Care

Abstract: Research Strategy Provide details of the research strategy for the Theme including the aims and specific short (1 year), medium (2-3 years) and long (4-5 years) objectives. The Informatics Theme will continue to work wih established partnerships defined under the Leeds DEC for assessing the value of new diagnostic technology within the NHS. Ongoing work with Philips Heathcare will assess the function of home-based monitoring in patients undergoing chemotherapy. The device, which is capable of delivering crucial elements of the blood count including a total white count and neutrophil count will be assessed for its ability to define a new paradigm of care in which patients are able to report symptoms, assess crucial physiological parameters such as pulse, temperature and peripheral blood oxygenation from home. With remote transfer of this data to the clinical unit, the work aims to demonstrate that patients can be indentified who (i) do not need to attend the cancer centre/unit as an emergency but can be safely managed at home and (ii) patients with an early significant fall in blood counts which are associated with a significant risk of neutropenic sepsis in whom early intervention may improve outcomes. In collaboration with Caris Life Sciences we have successfully completed recruitment to a clinical trial assessing the feasibility of performing detailed molecular profiling to guide ongoing therapy in patients having chemotherapy in which there is no defined standard of care. Ongoing work will examine the clinical impact of molecular profiling and assessing the health economic impact of this technology using routinely collected NHS data. Johnson is leading a large group of computer scientists (8 PhD students, 1 PDRA) using the facilities at LIDA and routine NHS data from the Leeds Region to mine and map patient pathways. The infrastructure, tools and methods are being used to help produce and interpret data to assess real-world impact of the Philips Healthcare home diagnostic device and this will be extended through the MIC-DEL to establish a generalised platform to support IVD clinical trials and health economic evaluation. Medium term: In the medium-term, we will work with local, regional and national partners in health-care, academia and the commercial sector to further develop both the depth and breadth of clinical and economic data and, with LIDA, the technical capacity and capabilities with which to automate the analysis of routine data from the Leeds Region. In addition, we will work with academic) and commercial groups to integrate new technologies in the fields of process mining and cognitive computing including both text analytics and machine learning to facilitate the use of unstructured data available within e-health records. We will use the NETIMIS simulation tool (supported by health economic data) to help IVD manufacturers develop “before and after” business cases that demonstrate improvements to patient pathways. The work will also continue to develop a robust information governance framework and ethical oversight to ensure patient and public support and involvement in this work. The enhanced capabilities within this area will focus on and further strengthen our ability to deliver within the key disease specific themes previously defined. The LIDA analytics platform has already attracted significant commercial interest (QuntilesIMS) and we will leverage these relationships to attract inward investment and new technologies to the centre. Long term: In the longer-term we will establish these developments to work with academic and industrial partners to attract national and International IVD manufacturers to the Leeds Region. Our plans will closely align with those of strategic partners developing the region as a “learning health system” where informatics supports information flows from clinical practice that give near real time feedback on test performance and the effectiveness of diagnostic interventions. We will develop informatics service offerings for IVD manufacturers that are world-leading and, through the National Pathology Exchange, integrate diagnostic data into NHS routine care nationally.


Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE;CANCER AND NEOPLASMS