Great Ormond Street and Roche UK partner to improve child care using AI

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) and Roche UK have partnered to co-develop digital tools aimed at identifying better ways to care for children and young people with rare and complex diseases.

Building on GOSH’s position as a leader in digital innovation in the NHS, the collaboration uses cutting-edge technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to enable better use of data that is routinely collected to improve care at GOSH and beyond.

While no patient data is shared, these new tools will allow data to be harnessed in secure and novel ways, improving clinical care and patient experience.

It will optimise the development of innovative new treatments for rare and complex diseases, helping to get them from the lab to the patient more quickly.

Professor Neil Sebire, chief research information officer at GOSH’s Data Research, Innovation and Virtual Environments unit (GOSH DRIVE), said: “We are one of the most digitally advanced hospitals in Europe and have over 170 years of experience caring for children and young people with complex health conditions.

“This means we have a huge amount of experience and information that can help us to find new and better ways to diagnose and treat patients and run our hospital.

“But we need new tools to harness the power of this data. Our partnership with Roche UK will help us do this by enhancing our data capabilities and infrastructure.”

This first-of-a-kind collaboration aims to develop better understanding of how the NHS and pharmaceutical companies can work together to improve the lives of patients.

By enabling the automated analysis of anonymised information – such as genomic data, images and text – tools and clinical workflows can be developed to enhance clinical decision-making at scale across the NHS, with the ultimate goal of ensuring patients get the best possible care at each step of their journey, built on learnings from every patient that has been treated before.

Work with a range of partners

Roche UK will provide funding and second staff to work closely with GOSH DRIVE. Directed by a steering group of leaders from both organisations, the team will work with other partners such as the public, patients, UK Government bodies and healthcare partners, adopting a system change approach that can create benefit across the NHS.

All projects undertaken within the partnership are conducted within GOSH’s secure digital research infrastructure and no patient data is shared between the organisations or outside of GOSH.

Richard Erwin, general manager at Roche UK, said: “Like GOSH, we are committed to doing everything we can to ensure patients have the best possible experience and outcomes.

“Through our collaboration, we can show how the NHS and pharma can work together to develop technologies that optimise the use of data already collected within the NHS to deploy real world applications that deliver benefit to patients and health systems.”

Recently, Roche UK also partnered with digital health technology company Nye Health to co-create digital solutions that learn, personalise and adapt to patients’ needs outside of a hospital or traditional clinical setting.