Reinventing clinical trials: delivering on the vision of digital transformation in health

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Last year 870,000 patients in the NHS had the opportunity to access cutting-edge treatments early as part of clinical trials.  NHS DigiTrial is one of seven new hubs announced by Health Data Research UK. The hubs aim to reinvent the approach to trials, enabling cutting-edge research for health discoveries, to help bring new therapies to millions more NHS patients. I am proud that at IBM we will be at the heart of this new national hub, bringing our technology and expertise to help enable a step-change in the UK health research ecosystem.

This approach truly delivers on the vision of digital reinvention of healthcare, at scale and at pace. The hub aims to drive a revolution, not an evolution – helping to change the way in which clinical trials are delivered – providing foundation services quickly to determine whether a clinical trial is feasible, and to support better planning and delivery of clinical trials in the UK.

NHS DigiTrial is a collaboration between NHS Digital, the University of Oxford, IBM and Microsoft, supported by the Health Data Research UK programme. NHS DigiTrial will securely and safely identify patients suitable for a specific clinical trial in the NHS, ensuring the wishes of patients who have either opted-in or opted-out are respected.

NHS Digital will lead the collaboration and provide the service with world-class system security to leverage the globally-unique data assets within the NHS whilst ensuring strict adherence to information governance standards, patient confidentiality, data protection legislation and upholding patient privacy rights.

The Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford will bring insights and expertise in clinical trial leadership to the collaboration building on a proven track record in the safe management of clinical data and in running landmark trials of treatments for heart, kidney and diabetes.

IBM will provide deep expertise in digital, technical service design and modelling, data capabilities, programme management and expertise in the Life Sciences sector. IBM’s focus on ethical tech, open standards, open source and interoperability coupled with our experience in developing large scale technology architecture, and cybersecurity at scale mean that our teams are ideally placed to partner with leaders in the UK health ecosystem to develop this offering.

Building on the work of the Office for Life Sciences and the Life Sciences Sector Deal to drive investment into the UK,  NHS DigiTrial aims to help make the UK a magnet for clinical trials globally – helping to bring more trials into the UK and with national reach, meaning that patients across the whole of the NHS have the potential to benefit from cutting edge medicines.

I am excited that IBM will be at the centre of scaling up this new approach so that more NHS patients can have the opportunity to be part of clinical trials and improving the UK’s world-leading offer to clinical researchers.

Dr Nicole Mather leads our Life Sciences work in IBM Global Business Services in London and is a Non- Executive Director of the Health Research Authority and of the Sanger Centre GRL.