Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has opened its Imperial Health Knowledge Bank to all patients across the trust, following a successful trial with oncology, hepatology and cardiology patients.
THE Imperial Health Knowledge Bank is a database of patients who have agreed to be contacted directly about clinical trials and studies that concern them and who have agreed to collect and store their health information and samples for research purposes.
Researchers at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and partner organizations can apply to invite patients from the database to take part in a research study, if their pseudonymised health data matches the requirements.
The Knowledge Bank automatically extracts information from the medical records of patients who have registered to be part of the database, including notes associated with routine care, details of their health conditions, treatments and medications they receive. 'they take.
Access to data is approved by a dedicated access committee led by the trust and made up of patient representatives, clinicians and academics.
Patients can also choose to provide a blood sample which will be stored with their data, with the test ordered automatically and carried out at their next routine appointment without the need for an additional hospital visit.
The knowledge bank is funded by the Imperial Biomedical Research Center at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), a translational research partnership between Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Imperial College London, which has received $95 million of pounds sterling in 2022 to continue developing new treatments and diagnostics for patients.
Its expansion follows that of 2023 launch of digital collaboration space at Imperial College Healthcare NHS TrustThe development of Paddington Life Sciences to help drive health data-driven research.
One of the aims of the knowledge bank is to enable research questions to be guided by the priorities of the North West London community through a better understanding of their health needs.
It will also support the discovery and validation of new targets and biomarkers for disease detection, diagnosis and treatment.
Professor Mark Thursz, Director of the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, said: “To better understand health and improve care, we need a rich, continually updated resource of medical data from interactions real with patients.
“The Imperial Health Knowledge Bank will offer our patients the opportunity to get to the heart of medical science and play a role in developing new treatments, medicines and tests that could have a huge impact on the lives of others.