Call to use Spine to find drug trial patients

The BioIndustry Association has expressed an interest in tapping into the NHS’s Spine database and using patient information to identify potentially willing drug test subjects.

Speaking to the Scotsman, the association’s chief executive, Aisling Burnand said: “The UK has a real opportunity because the NHS’s patient records make this a unique place in the world to study clinical trends. We are not there yet, but that is the vision.”

A BioIndustry Association spokesperson told E-Health Insider that Burnand was responding to suggestions made in the Cooksey Review into UK health research funding last December, and that other research organisations would hold similar interests.

In his foreword to the review, Sir David Cooksey, said: “The potential offered by the new ‘Connecting for Health’ IT database which will contain the medical records of the 8m inhabitants of England and should be accessible (with strong patient confidentiality safeguards) for important research, including clinical trials and subsequent pharmaco-vigilance studies of newly released drugs. In addition, there are the opportunities offered by the development of biomarkers and the emerging research into stem cell therapies.

“Combined with the reorganisation of the NHS R&D function to make it more accessible and transparent for industry, this opens the door for the UK to excel again in healthcare innovation and service delivery. The Review sets out to describe how this can be delivered. It is a once in a generation opportunity to do so and for Britain to take a leading position in a major sector of the knowledge based economy.”

The review recommended the establishment of a pilot programme, under the joint auspices of the NHS SDO (Service, Delivery and Organisation) programme and the NHS’ Connecting for Health ‘National Knowledge Service’, to examine the effectiveness of employing a small number of full-time ‘Knowledge Transfer Champions’, whose job would be to disseminate the findings of health services research and facilitate early adoption of those findings into routine practice in the NHS.

It re-iterated that Connecting for Health was established in 2005 to enhance Knowledge Reception and Use in the NHS via the National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT).

“The National Programme for Information Technology, operated by NHS Connecting for Health, may be an important first step in the evolution of decision-based software systems that healthcare professionals will need in order to manage effectively the growing scale of our knowledge base and thus improve the care of patients. However, this programme is not likely to be operational at such a level for some time. Nor has it been designed specifically for the purpose of knowledge transfer.

“In any event, the uptake of new knowledge, particularly complex information, often depends the direct communication of new potential users with those familiar with that new technology, so that solutions involving information technology are unlikely to be entirely sufficient. Likewise, direct marketing or information campaigns are unlikely to adequately support the spread of these types of knowledge within the health services.”

The BioIndustry Association spokesperson told EHI that CfH have been working with the UK Clinical Research Collaboration to ensure that the Spine does have a strong research component, but discussions relating to usage of any data stored will need to wait until progress has been made on delivering the system.

Connecting for Health’s director of clinical knowledge, process and safety, Sir Muir Gray said: “There are still major problems in implementing best current evidence and I am in discussion with the producers of research evidence to discuss ways in which their outputs could be much more easily and quickly put into practice.”

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Links

Cooksey review http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/56F/62/pbr06_cooksey_final_report_636.pdf

BioIndustry Association http://www.bioindustry.org/

National Knowledge Service http://www.nks.nhs.uk/