Digital and healthcare experts have joined forces to look at ways that Pathology data can be used more effectively to support Black Country patients with anaemia and the clinicians who treat them.
DRE Digital is working with The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT) on the project which will explore whether the data currently gathered can more clearly identify at risk patients and help clinicians to anticipate associated issues.
The initial focus will be on the “Anaemia Management Support in Clinical Practice” care pathway which looks at cause, investigation and management of the condition. Data taken from Pathology will be used to gather information to help a better understanding of how often diseases occur in different groups of people and why.
DRE Digital is a leader in data technologies, data security and integrity and will be using a specific platform, DDX, that will enable all staff, regardless of their technical knowledge, to work with data comfortably to be able to make decisions.
RWT is one of the leading NHS organisations in driving digitally innovative healthcare with integrated clinical data from primary, community and acute services which provide a holistic view of the patient’s journey.
Professor Mark Livingston, Consultant Clinical Biochemist at RWT, said: “Anaemia is very common (affecting more than 2.4 billion people globally) and is identified across the healthcare system, including primary and secondary care.
“There are many causes and it is associated with increased mortality, ill-health, poor physical and cognitive development, and sometimes, very serious disease. Anaemia is often not spotted, nor properly investigated, or treated.
“Working with DRE Digital, our focus is to integrate multi-source healthcare datasets across clinical systems to build an innovative digital footprint end-to-end across the patient pathway, providing innovation in care delivery. We want to see if we can use our data more effectively to improve patient care as well as supporting our clinical workforce.”
Del Alibocus, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of DRE Digital said: “By leveraging the power of linked care pathways and innovative approaches to data, this innovative collaboration aims to drive positive change in patient care, research, and development.”
Dr Tirath Virdee, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of DRE Digital added: “Care pathways serve as structured, standardised plans that outline the ideal sequence of steps in healthcare delivery for specific conditions or procedures. By linking these care pathways with better defined and categorised data, a comprehensive framework can be established, connecting all relevant health data and information associated with a patient's journey.”
The project will focus on linking care pathways to data ontology (the classification and explanation of the current data), and aims to:
- Understand the extent of the data/catalogue
- Understand data objects and their relationships to see whether those relationships feature in more than one clinical pathway
- Briefly understand the care pathways and their relationship to organisational processes in different contexts
- Demonstrate possible values of data to improve care pathways
By utilising the clinical data, the clinical expertise at RWT and the technical specialties provided by DRE, this approach could also be utilised across healthcare organisations through the identification of gaps within service delivery, informing how departments are resourced.
