REAL Health

REAL – Health, a Research Enabled Learning Health System in East London: Unlocking the Potential of Big-Data Science to Improve Public Health

Dr John Robson, Professor Christopher Griffiths, Professor Carol Dezateaux and Professor Adam Timmis

Awarded £2.2M

REAL-Health creates a unique opportunity to develop the infrastructure and capacity at scale for an innovative, nationally and internationally leading, ‘first in class’ Research Enabled Learning Health System.

The System will align science, informatics, incentives, and culture for continuous improvement and innovation, with best practices seamlessly embedded in the delivery process and new knowledge capture.

REAL – Health builds on existing expertise and assets to develop three exemplar research projects which demonstrate the scientific and service applications of big data and health data science applied to important clinical and public health issues:

REAL – Child Health (childhood obesity, sickle cell and congenital thyroid disorders) will provide unique information for policy and practice including development of a programme to support families to reduce childhood obesity. It will also improve management of sickle cell disorders.

REAL – Respiratory Health: asthma affects 1 in 10 of the local population. Neither hospital admission rates nor mortality have reduced in the last decade. The aim of this study is to reduce admissions in poorly controlled asthma by 10%.

REAL – Cardiovascular Health: heart attack and stroke prevention through the optimisation of blood pressure treatment, use of statins and anticoagulants to internationally leading levels.

REAL – Health will also create easier access for clinicians and scientists to linked big data sets from electronic health records. Clinicians will be directly informed about individual patient clinical care including treatment decision support, safety flags, and monitoring. This linked data will also provide wider opportunities for translational research leveraging additional research funding.