Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust has outlined plans to become a “nationally-recognised centre of excellence for clinical research”, utilising AI and data as part of its innovation strategy.
By 2030, the trust plans to ensure that it is delivering “high-impact, patient-focused research” to inform the best possible future care for patients, focusing on areas such as genomics, robotic surgery, and rare diseases, and integrating research governance processes and infrastructure with the University of Surrey.
The trust sets the objective of harnessing digital innovation, AI, and health data to accelerate discovery, evaluation, and implementation of research findings into routine care. By 2030, it looks to “actively contribute” to the integration of tech and AI in research programmes, to enhance digital literacy and capability within research teams, and to use data analytics and AI to inform study design and delivery.
In achieving these goals, Royal Surrey will be developing a secure data environment and harnessing clinical data to generate insights to inform research priorities and address emerging public health challenges; establishing a clear pathway to accelerate from discovery through to adoption into practice; enabling safe use of trust-held clinical data to support research; and work with the transformation team to support the “Dragon’s Den” programme development of the trust innovation hub to support researchers in accessing funding and support for innovative ideas.
More will be done to support ideas relating to AI and medical imaging through partnerships with industry and academia, according to Royal Surrey, along with a push toward AI and big data across acute and community settings. The trust will also evaluate and monitor the impact of digital interventions with clinicians, patients, and local communities.
Success will be measured through the number of funding awards for digital innovation and data-driven research, an expanded portfolio of research “demonstrating measurable impact on clinical care, pathways, and guidance”, the number of digital and AI-enabled studies initiated, and 100 percent information governance compliance. An electronic tracking system will be introduced to increase visibility of study set-up status, and electronic dashboards featuring information on activity, performance, and financial management using PowerBI, helping to benchmark performance against other NHS organisations.
Wider trend: research across the health and care sector
A team of researchers at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust have created an AI tool designed to read ECGs and support doctors identify those at risk of developing the potentially fatal heart condition, heart block. AIRE-CHB is an AI tool that has been developed with support from the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre and funding from the British Heart Foundation. It has been trained on over 1.1 million ECG heart recordings from 190,000 patients in Boston and tested on a further 50,000 people from the UK, said to allow it to detect the earliest signs of heart block and identify patients who will encounter problems later on in life if the condition is left untreated.
£3.4 million in UKRI funding has been awarded to the University of Leeds and Aston University for a joint research network to assess AI tools and promote responsible AI innovation in research. In particular, the network looks to respond to challenges faced by doctoral researchers resulting from a lack of guidance around the responsible use of publicly-available AI tools in research. It will look to carry out extensive engagement with PhD researchers, supervisors and research staff to understand how such tools can be used to innovate, along with any identified challenges. This information will then be used to create a resource containing guidance on available AI tools, their intended uses, and best practice use cases.
Researchers at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Cambridge are to lead on a project to create a “publicly accessible platform for exploring how genes and molecules influence mental health”. The Open Psychiatry Project, has been provided with £2.3 million funding from the UK Research and Innovation Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health and Care Research. The project aims to deliver a platform to offer data-driven support to researchers, clinicians, health partners and patients when it comes to understanding mental health conditions and how best to treat them.
