The Royal Marsden partners with Agilisys

This initiative is an integral part of the Trust’s wider digital transformation objective which will help to improve ways of working through providing a more updated, innovative storage system for patient and clinical data that can be used in a better way to provide insights and help inform decisions for patients. It replaces a system that was first developed by The Royal Marsden nearly four decades ago and was, at the time, one of the first clinical databases and fully integrated electronic patient record (EPR) solutions.

The Royal Marsden is a world-leading cancer centre specialising in cancer diagnosis, treatment, research, and education. As the largest comprehensive cancer centre in Europe, The Royal Marsden sees nearly 60,000 patients every year. Together with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), working closely with its academic partner, The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), its ground-breaking research influences how cancer patients are treated and cared for across the UK and around the world.

The Royal Marsden is now investing in a solution, delivered in partnership with ClikHealth Solutions and Aridhia, that will enhance its ability to undertake transformational clinical informatics. Once fully operational, the system will provide staff with advanced data and analytics that will support the continued delivery of the highest standards of patient care. Clinical researchers and scientists will have rapid access to both the data and the tools that will enable radical new approaches into cancer research. In addition, hospital staff across all disciplines will benefit from access to their own suite of analytical tools and visualisations all driven from the same patient-centric cancer data model. 

Steven Francis, Director of Performance & Information at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust said: “The new solution we are designing with Agilisys will enable us to make a significant step-change in the way the organisation interacts with data in all aspects of research, planning, and delivery of care. Our clinical and operational data is such a rich, asset, and we must ensure it can be securely and appropriately leveraged by clinicians, staff and our academic partners to provide insights, inform decisions, and facilitate discovery.”

“Through the Agilisys-led solution we will be able to redefine how stakeholders interact with data, whether on their mobile phone, tablet or laptop. They will have the right information, at the right time to make the right decisions.”

This ambitious goal requires the re-engineering of The Royal Marsden’s cancer data model, built for the future, optimised to deliver rapid insights and to exploit all the benefits of a robust and secure cloud platform provided through Microsoft Azure technologies. The solution will provide a high-performance database which will be capable of processing large volumes of structured and unstructured data with proprietary machine learning algorithms.

Agilisys is one of the UK’s fastest growing and innovative cloud and digital transformation specialists across the public sector, enabling organisations to adopt technologies, platforms and processes that promote new ways of working.

The Royal Marsden currently has an active portfolio of over 450 research trials and recruits over 4,000 trial patients each year. Upgrading the data environment will provide new ways for teams to rapidly identify patients who will benefit from specific clinical trials, supporting  data driven research by being able to supply up-to-date data at volume.

Paul Williams, BRC Informatics Programme Manager at The Royal Marsden said: “The Royal Marsden and ICR together operate the only Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) dedicated to cancer. We are one of 20 BRCs in England, each funded by the National Institute for Health Research, and our goal is to undertake translational research that rapidly accelerates clinical discoveries from the research environment to direct patient care – a ‘bench to bedside’ approach. This initiative represents a paradigm shift in our informatics capability, laying the foundation for the development of AI technologies in imaging and clinical decision-support informatics that will have a radical impact on patient care.”

Max Jones, Managing Partner – Health at Agilisys added: “The Royal Marsden wanted to do a complete data refresh from top to bottom so that it could improve the way stakeholders interacted with the data. To glean as much potentially life-saving information from the data as possible, it was imperative that complex algorithms could be run atop the data.

“The proposed solution offers a cost-effective means for Royal Marsden to store, process and access several terabytes of sensitive data in seconds. The project supports The Royal Marsden in maintaining its position as a digital trailblazer in healthcare.”