Secondary Care

Coventry and Warwickshire licences anonymised ophthalmology patient data

Artificial intelligence and health data company, RAIR Health, has signed a deal with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust to access anonymised patient data in the field of ophthalmology.

The company focuses on the development of proprietary insights from ophthalmic data and images, and has signed a non-exclusive data license agreement with the trust.

The data will be used by the company to develop insights that could help ophthalmologists to diagnose diseases earlier and support clinical decision making, by using advanced data sciences, including artificial intelligence and image-based machine learning. 

It will also support researchers develop and refine treatments, using the data and images from the ophthalmology department, which holds over 106,000 appointments a year typically.

Professor Kiran Patel, Chief Medical Officer at UHCW NHS Trust, said: “UHCW continues to lead the field in data-led research and image analytics and we look forward to working with RAIR to extend this leadership into the field of ophthalmology and beyond.”

“We hope to improve the care we provide to our patients by using RAIR’s model to provide improved access to data and we believe the application of artificial intelligence will help us achieve this.”

Roy Davis, Chairman of RAIR Health, said: “The organisation’s excellence in imaging and significant data base provide a tremendous foundation for future data-led research and promises to accelerate medical advances, not just in ophthalmology, but across a number of systemic and chronic conditions which exhibit in the eye.”

Under the terms of the agreement, UHCW will benefit from a right to royalties on any products or services which result from the insights derived from UHCW data and to participate in any future increase in the value of RAIR’s equity capital.