King’s College London, part of King’s Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre, will lead a consortium of 15 European Universities and two private partners to develop methods, standards and systems for the integration of healthcare computer systems for clinical care and research.
Clinical research is often costly and slow. It is difficult to find suitable subjects and time consuming to follow them up. TRANSFoRm will facilitate both these activities using routine healthcare data.
Robert Lechler, Vice-Principal (Health) and Executive Director King’s Health Partners comments: ‘TRANSFoRm is an informatics project that helps achieve the aims of King’s Health Partners to increase the amount of clinical research taking place in South East London, particularly in general practices.
Professor Brendan Delaney, the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity Chair in Primary Care Research is the project lead as well as a practising GP in London. Professor Delaney says: “TRANSFoRm is an informatics project that helps achieve the aims of King’s Health Partners to increase the amount of clinical research taking place in SE London, particularly in general practices.”
TRANSFoRm will demonstrate the use of routine healthcare data in clinical research using two exemplar problems, one in the management of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, the other in Diabetes.
Supporting diagnosis in General Practice
The project will aid General Practitioners in diagnosis by integrating decision support directly into their electronic records systems.
Dr Olga Kostopoulou (Senior Lecturer) will be studying how different types of diagnostic prompts and alerts might influence the diagnostic performance of GPs. King’s College London and Birmingham University will be developing a generic interface to allow GPs using different record systems to use TRANSFoRm, seamlessly integrated into their existing system.
Dr Kostopoulou says: “Prompt diagnosis is a fundamental task for GPs, as they are in many countries the gatekeepers to specialist care and see patients with early disease. The challenge is to identify patients with serious disease such as cancer or heart disease without over-investigating the much larger numbers of patients without serious disease. The symptoms and signs of serious disease are often non-specific and can be attributed to more common and less serious conditions.”
Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity said: “We are delighted that the Charity’s support is enabling Professor Delaney and his team to spearhead such significant work in the field of health informatics. These two initiatives will not only improve the level of care provided to patients, but will also drive the scale and quality of primary care research across Europe.”
