King’s Health Partners, a partnership between Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital, South London and Maudsley, and King’s College London, has published a strategy to 2030 built around the three strategic priorities of delivering personalised health, improving population health, and accelerating digital health.
“Despite the promise of improved health outcomes, enhanced patient experience, and reduced healthcare costs, digital health and data science innovations are often delayed or obstructed by barriers, such as vast translational gaps between early research and clinical care, lack of integrated data across physical and mental health services, or limited digital healthcare knowledge in the workforce,” it states.
Setting out to connect academia with healthcare and industry, the partnership commits to accelerating innovation from ideation to validation, with an operating model based around bringing together those whose collaboration has the potential to drive transformational change for patients and the system as a whole.
Strategic objectives to 2030 cover the improvement and integration of data systems to drive innovation, including linking Epic and LUCI electronic patient data platforms together and connecting South East London’s health data records to offer data for research and real-world evaluation. Tailored training in data science, AI, and digital health tools will be offered through the KHP Digital Health Academy for staff in clinical and research roles, and equity will be promoted through inclusive outreach programmes.
On creating impact the partnership shares examples of ongoing work and collaboration such as the London Medical Imaging & AI Centre for Value-Based Healthcare, led by King’s College London and based at St Thomas’ Hospital. Here, teams are currently exploring how AI can help to safely support care. The PharosAI platform, led by researchers and clinicians from across the partnership, is also “refining decades of NHS cancer data and creating an unprecedented 360-degree profile view of each patient”, to help transform cancer care and inform the development of personalised medicine.
For personalised care, examples of impact include the development of “the largest sickle cell research portfolio in the UK”, and the authorisation of King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust as one of five UK sites authorised to treat patients with a new gene therapy for sick call disease. “The discovery that led to the development of this treatment came from a clinical academic across King’s College London and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust,” the partnership shares.
Another example is King’s College London’s UK Smart Trials Development Hub, which reportedly draws on expertise from across the partnership to make clinical trials more inclusive and to support the delivery of personalised care tailored to individual needs. The KHP Centre for Translational Medicine is also said to be “prioritising research that aims to reduce health inequities”.
The strategy goes on to outline objectives connected to population and personalised health, focusing on generating evidence to advance preventative health and turning insights into improvements. Also included are plans for developing population health training resources, focusing on increasing diversity in clinical research trials, and accelerating the delivery of innovative trials and therapies to patients.
An impact framework highlights the ways the impact and benefits of the partnership’s work will be measured. On access to innovation, this will look at the number of new personalised interventions and technologies implemented and scaled in clinical settings, and the number of patients recruited to trials, for example. Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs), audits of specific clinical pathways, and the benchmarking of clinical outcomes will help measure success for impact goals around health outcomes.
To measure NHS productivity and system sustainability benefits, outcomes will be assessed based on the number of innovations or interventions piloted, implemented, or scaled in clinical settings with evaluation; with efficiency gains such as reduced length of stay, and the impact of innovations scaled across the wider system also informing the overall view of success. The partnership similarly seeks to measure influence and thought leadership by considering the reach of its activities, the number of “highly cited” publications, global rankings, and other forms of recognition.
Research and innovation across health and care
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Arcturis, becoming part of Arcturis’ Real-World Data Network, a network providing real-time access to “diverse and enriched” health data representative of the UK population.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust also launched the Centre for Emergency Care and Global Health, designed to foster international collaboration and innovation as a “direct and necessary response” to urgent challenges facing emergency departments across the country.
NHS England has published data on the use of the AI-driven, 3D heart scan technology, Heartflow, demonstrating its impact across 56 different NHS hospitals in England when diagnosing and supporting patients with suspected heart disease.
The EuroHeartPath project has been launched, with a €27 million budget spanning five years for 18 pioneering pathfinder studies focusing on AI and machine learning, digital health integration, point-of-care diagnostics, and advanced robotic technologies.
