HDR-UK Team of the Year Finalist
Getting data in near real time offers profound benefits for everything from clinical decisions about individual patients to resource management across entire hospitals. A multidisciplinary team from University College London Hospitals (UCLH) spent two years developing the Experimental Medicine Application Platform (EMAP) platform to make fuller, faster, more effective use of data in electronic health records (EHRs).
The COVID pandemic saw them demonstrate the quality of the platform and the team. Using the EMAP infrastructure they rapidly created a bed management tool that helped take pressure off north London intensive care units (ICUs). Now the team has facilitated a series of grants to take their work into new areas including better antibiotic stewardship.
Outstanding achievements
When COVID cases surged the EMAP team, co-led by UCLH critical care consultant Dr Steve Harris, responded with a bed management tool that reported in near real time. This allowed staff to be allocated where they were most needed and kept transfer beds available at all times. The tool supported the treatment of 434 critically ill patients (including retrieving 162 patients to the UCHL surge centre) from overstretched units across north London.