Royal Marsden partners with Agilisys to innovate data systems

Published: 17-Feb-2021

Trust sets its sights on cloud-provisioned services to deliver transformational informatics

The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust has selected a consortium led by Agilisys to help deliver an innovative new informatics environment for its clinical, operational and research analytics over the next five years.

The initiative is an integral part of the trust’s wider digital transformation objective which will help to improve ways of working through providing a more-updated, innovative storage system for patient and clinical data that can be used in a better way to provide insights and help inform decisions for patients.

The new solution will enable us to make a significant step change in the way the organisation interacts with data in all aspects of research, planning, and delivery of care

It replaces a system that was first developed by The Royal Marsden nearly four decades ago and was, at the time, one of the first clinical databases and fully integrated electronic patient record (EPR) solutions.

Delivered in partnership with ClikHealth Solutions and Aridhia, the new solution will enhance its ability to undertake transformational clinical informatics.

Once fully operational, it will provide staff with advanced data and analytics that will support the continued delivery of the highest standards of patient care.

And clinical researchers and scientists will have rapid access to both the data and the tools that will enable radical new approaches into cancer research.

In addition, hospital staff across all disciplines will benefit from access to their own suite of analytical tools and visualisations, all driven from the same patient-centric cancer data model.

Steven Francis, director of performance and information at the trust, said: “The new solution we are designing with Agilisys will enable us to make a significant step change in the way the organisation interacts with data in all aspects of research, planning, and delivery of care.

“Our clinical and operational data is such a rich asset and we must ensure it can be securely and appropriately leveraged by clinicians, staff and our academic partners to provide insights, inform decisions, and facilitate discovery.

“Through the Agilisys-led solution we will be able to redefine how stakeholders interact with data, whether on their mobile phone, tablet or laptop. They will have the right information, at the right time, to make the right decisions.”

This ambitious goal requires the re-engineering of The Royal Marsden’s cancer data model, built for the future and optimised to deliver rapid insights and to exploit all the benefits of a robust and secure cloud platform provided through Microsoft Azure technologies.

The proposed solution offers a cost-effective means for Royal Marsden to store, process and access several terabytes of sensitive data in seconds

The solution will provide a high-performance database which will be capable of processing large volumes of structured and unstructured data with proprietary machine learning algorithms.

Paul Williams, Biomedical Research Centre informatics programme manager at The Royal Marsden, said: “The Royal Marsden and ICR together operate the only Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) dedicated to cancer and our goal is to undertake translational research that rapidly accelerates clinical discoveries from the research environment to direct patient care – a ‘bench to bedside’ approach.

“This initiative represents a paradigm shift in our informatics capability, laying the foundation for the development of AI technologies in imaging and clinical decision-support informatics that will have a radical impact on patient care.”

Max Jones, managing partner for health at Agilisys, added: “The Royal Marsden wanted to do a complete data refresh from top to bottom so that it could improve the way stakeholders interacted with the data.

“To glean as much potentially-life-saving information from the data as possible, it was imperative that complex algorithms could be run atop the data.

“The proposed solution offers a cost-effective means for Royal Marsden to store, process and access several terabytes of sensitive data in seconds.

“And the project supports The Royal Marsden in maintaining its position as a digital trailblazer in healthcare.”

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