ISCF HDRUK DIH Sprint Exemplar: Using Routine NHS Data to Accelerate Clinical Trial Recruitment

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Every NHS hospital keeps a detailed record of activities both for the purposes of individual patient care and to ensure that the hospital is properly paid for the work that it does. A monthly report of activity, described in terms of ‘hospital episodes’ is sent to NHS Digital, who host the data in trust for the nation. Large-scale, randomised clinical trials allow us to establish whether or not a particular treatment works and whether it is safe. This knowledge is invaluable: without it, hospitals might be reluctant to adopt some new, life-saving innovation, or a new, more effective medicine might remain unproven and unused. However, clinical trials can be very expensive to conduct and many fail to recruit sufficient numbers of patients to allow them to provide a conclusive answer in a timely fashion. This project will develop a system that uses the ‘hospital episodes’ information to identify potentially suitable patients from across the country so that they could be asked if they wished to take part in clinical trials. Previous studies have demonstrated that such an approach can be very successful in recruiting large numbers of patient volunteers to join major clinical research studies.