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

国民保健制度下的每一家医院都有详细的活动记录，这既是为了对病人进行个人护理，也是为了确保医院所做的工作得到适当的报酬。一份以“医院事件”描述的月度活动报告被发送给NHS数字部门，后者托管着全国的数据。大规模的随机临床试验使我们能够确定一种特定的治疗方法是否有效，是否安全。这些知识是无价的：没有它，医院可能不愿意采用一些新的、挽救生命的创新，或者一种新的、更有效的药物可能仍未得到证实和使用。然而，临床试验的进行可能非常昂贵，而且许多临床试验未能招募到足够数量的患者，从而无法及时提供结论性的答案。该项目将开发一个系统，该系统使用“医院事件”信息来识别来自全国各地的潜在合适患者，以便询问他们是否希望参加临床试验。以前的研究表明，这种方法可以非常成功地招募大量患者志愿者加入主要的临床研究。

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.