Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has opened up its Imperial Health Knowledge Bank to every patient in the trust, following a successful trial with patients across oncology, hepatology and cardiology.
The Imperial Health Knowledge Bank is a database of patients who have agreed to be contacted directly about clinical trials and studies that are relevant to them and have agreed for the trust to collect and store their health information and samples for research.
Researchers at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and partner organisations can request to invite patients in the database to participate in a research study, if their pseudonymised health data matches the requirements.
The knowledge bank automatically pulls information from the medical notes of patients who have signed up to be part of the database, including notes associated with routine care, details of their conditions, treatments and medicines they take.
Access to the data is approved through a dedicated access committee run by the trust and made up of patient representatives, clinicians and academics.
Patients can also opt to provide a blood sample to be stored alongside their data, with the test ordered automatically and taken at their next routine appointment without the need for an additional hospital visit.
The knowledge bank is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, a translational research partnership between Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Imperial College London, which was awarded £95 million in 2022 to continue developing new experimental treatments and diagnostics for patients.
Its expansion follows the 2023 launch of a Digital Collaboration Space at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust‘s Paddington Life Sciences development to help boost health data-enabled research.
One of the aims of the knowledge bank is to enable research questions to be guided by the priorities of the north west London community by better understanding their health needs.
It will also support the discovery and validation of new targets and biomarkers for detection, diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Professor Mark Thursz, director of the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, said: “In order to better understand health and improve care, we need a continually updated and rich resource of medical data from real life patient interactions.
“The Imperial Health Knowledge Bank will provide our patients with an opportunity to get right to the heart of medical science and play a role in the development of new treatments, drugs and tests that could have a huge impact on the lives of others.”