Barts Health NHS Trust

With investment from Barts Charity, we built and launched the Barts Health Data Platform to support analysis using real world health data for research and clinical purposes with a self-service web portal to give accredited users access to this unique resource.

The Barts Health Data Platform makes it faster to set up research and clinical analysis projects – reducing the expected data access request time locally to six to eight weeks – while the diverse data helps ensure healthcare innovation reflects the needs of different groups more fairly. This work positions Barts Health NHS Trust as a leader in data-driven healthcare, which is frequently undertaken with Queen Mary University in East London, through the Barts Life Sciences partnership, opening opportunities for collaboration with global pharma and bio-tech businesses to transform care for patients.

Setting the benchmark in data-driven healthcare research

Data-driven healthcare research is accelerating innovation, promising better health for people around the world. Barts Health NHS Trust, through the Barts Life Sciences partnership, is set to lead in this field.

The Trust, which includes five NHS hospitals and supports a patient population of two-and-a-half million, possesses a unique dataset. This comprises hospital records and image data, derived from some one million patient encounters every year. Ultimately, researchers with the appropriate permissions will be able to include and link primary care, community, and mental health data which represents the complete dataset of patient data. The data reflects East London’s remarkably diverse population, encompassing over 60 nationalities.

Accelerating innovation with faster access to data

Barts Health NHS Trust’s ambition was to make this data accessible for researchers and clinicians, helping ensure transparency and ethical access to data for new research projects.

Currently, researchers may spend years negotiating the ethical and regulatory barriers that protect sensitive health data, before having received these approvals to then face delays in accessing local data. The challenge Barts Health asked us to help solve was how to provide researchers worldwide with access to the data by tackling local access issues while maintaining security and accountability for how the data is used while remaining under our control.

Launching a data platform at pace

We hit the ground running immediately, leveraging the open source Microsoft Azure TRE as the blueprint for designing and configuring the Barts Health Data Platform.

We collaborated closely with Barts Health’s data platform team to design and configure a portal using Microsoft Power Pages to address local approval workflows. This portal enables approved users to securely access patient data via a web interface. Researchers can now log in from anywhere in the world, while patient data remains securely stored in the UK under the control of Barts Health. We also helped Barts Health transition from paper-based data access requests to a streamlined, efficient workflow system to assist the stakeholders involved in the approval process.

To achieve this, we applied a wide range of technical skills covering every stage of the development lifecycle. Throughout the project, we shared our knowledge, enabling Barts’ small technical team to independently run and scale the portal, with the goal of eventually supporting 150 research projects running concurrently.

By the six-month mark, both products were further developed and released as Beta versions to a larger research community. Our previous experience in developing other Microsoft Azure Data platforms, extensive network across the life sciences sector, and our proven track record, including work with Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, ensured we could deliver a working product quickly and safely.

Unlocking data insights for powerful impact

By automating the local data access requests from researchers and clinicians, the portal reduces the time to gain access to data and start their analysis by providing a single source of truth for everyone to interact with the request, all while ensuring ethical and regulatory compliance. Within weeks of launch, the portal was facilitating ten additional research projects.

Phase two of the collaboration, now underway, will onboard more data, including genomics data, as well as extending the portal’s functionality. For example, we are exploring opportunities to integrate cutting-edge tools, such as Microsoft’s Research Assistant, which leverages the Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search to streamline project setup and improve researcher workflows.