Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust (GOSH) has embarked upon a five-year collaborative working agreement to establish a new Clinical Informatics and Innovation Unit.
The partnership with Roche Products Limited is intended to move the specialist children’s trust ‘closer to personalised healthcare for children’ through both the creation of the new unit at GOSH – which will be an exemplar in the NHS – and work on four key areas.
The collaboration will focus on: improving research capability and clinical decision support systems; using digital tools to improve the collection of data from research and in clinical trials; using anonymised real-world data to improve paediatric personalised healthcare; improving clinical and research data using sensors, devices and wearable technology.
GOSH is aiming to utilise the partnership to ‘develop a better understanding of how the NHS and pharmaceutical companies can work together to improve the lives of patients’, with some ROCHE staff joining the trust on secondment, and GOSH DRIVE (Data Research, Innovation and Virtual Environments Unit) projects being led by a ‘steering group of leaders from both organisations’.
It’s hoped the new unit will provide not only benefits to patients but also become ‘financially sustainable’, while Roche will provide funding and the team will also work with other partners including the public, patients, UK Government bodies and others within healthcare.
GOSH says that the agreement means it now has the the opportunity to combine its ‘experience as a leader in digital innovation in the NHS with the expertise of Roche, to identify better ways to care for children and young people with rare and complex diseases’, and that as the trust is ‘closely connected with other UK and international children’s hospitals’, the work they do benefits children across the world.
However, despite using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to ‘enable a wide variety of anonymised data to be examined on a large scale to improve patient outcomes’, GOSH states that ‘no patient data will leave the GOSH DRIVE infrastructure’.
