Digital health

Harnessing the potential of healthcare data, alongside the development of new digital tools, including the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is a focus for the AHSC. Capitalising on the richness of information routinely collected through patient’s interactions at their GPs or in hospital can improve effectiveness, safety and experience of care for patients. In addition, technology advances capturing health and activity indicators (wearables) might also inform disease prevention and early diagnosis interventions.

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (ICHT) and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust (RMH) have both invested in research informatics platforms that overlay their electronic patient record and adhere to the highest standards of data security and privacy. Both ICHT’s iCARE and RMH’s BRIDgE are high performance secure data environments connected to consented databases (Imperial Health Knowledge Bank) of patients and biospecimens for research. This research infrastructure and ongoing plans to increase its utility will underpin many of the AHSC’s planned projects and programmes going forward. 

In addition, iCARE also hosts the integrated primary and social care patient records for all residents in North West London – Whole Systems Integrated Care (WSIC) – enabling linkage of rich and deep acute hospital data with broader information for all 2.8 million residents in North West London for both direct care and research.

Planned projects that will harness our digital capability can be found here.