Hospital sites across the country that use Epic are to introduce technology first implemented in the UK at UCLH.
And the tool and pathway developed to roll out this technology were heavily shaped by UCLH.
Last year UCLH became the first English-speaking Epic site in the world to implement SNOMED-CT – a structured clinical vocabulary – for diagnosis recording in Epic.
SNOMED-CT provides a single shared language that can be used by clinical IT systems. It means data held by different systems can be harmonised, to make the sharing of information easier, safer and more accurate.
The roll out across all Epic sites in the UK means that the shared language will affect up to 20 million people by 2025. UCLH will help other hospital sites implement the technology.
It is an example of UCLH work adopted by a large medical technology partner.
Use of SNOMED-CT will make it easier to run multi-centre clinical trials, particularly trials embedded in electronic health record systems. Any data-enabled trials at UCLH will be easier to scale to other UK sites and international partners.
Early adoption of SNOMED-CT at UCLH, and its wider roll out, are thanks for the BRC supported work of Dr Wai Keong Wong, UCLH’s Chief Research Information Officer, and Miss Leilei Zhu, Clinical Data Standards Lead at UCLH.
Dr Wong, also a Consultant Haematologist at UCLH, said: “We are proud of this partnership between UCLH and Epic. This technology will be hugely important in terms of harmonisation of data, making it easier to run large clinical trials across different NHS sites, and fostering collaboration between hospitals. It will improve the quality of research – but it will also have other clinical and operational uses – and ultimately this will all benefit patients.”
