HIGODS

‘Data-based medicine’ has the opportunity to improve the precision, quality, outcomes and efficiency of healthcare and to accelerate drug discovery.

Our theme will launch new initiatives in:

• Establishing a clinical research informatics unit (CRIU)  to develop tools for using data for research, seizing the opportunity provided by the EPIC procurement at UCLH, and delivering novel methods for evaluating regulatory pathways, including NICE recommendations. The team made up of UCLH and UCL experts aims to develop software that uses clinical data to quickly identify patients suitable for particular clinical trials.
• Real-time analytics for safety and quality of care: we will develop some of the core infrastructures to enable use of ‘high velocity’ data, with applications in exemplar clinical areas.
• About Me: extending the benefits of data and genomic insights to all NHS patients.  This will go beyond previous efforts which have been focused on a particular disease and seek to ‘give back’ results of immediate value to patients.  This will lead to data-driven (omic) drug-target identification/validation and approaches to precision medicine.
• Bringing big data to a wider range of researchers: we will develop tools and methods to make large scale national health record data (e.g. CALIBER), biobank data (e.g. UK Biobank) and other forms of data more readily analysable by other researchers.
• Human Phenome Project: the cradle to grave nature of health records, complemented by spells of richer phenotypic information from wearables, or from multi-omics, allows examination of the longitudinal time sequence of health events and diseases, clusters and sub-types of diseases.   Methods to begin to approach this ambitious and fundamental challenge, portable internationally, will be developed.

Taken together with collaboration with other themes, HIGODS will further develop the Local Digital Health Economy, consistent with UK Life Sciences Strategy; and the new multi-funder Health Data Research UK institute.

HIGODS, as a cross-cutting theme, is already developing joint infrastructure and research projects across multiple disease themes, and with the 'Healthcare Engineering and Imaging' theme.