Project lead: Professor Chris Kipps, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust

Development and Testing of Collaborative Data Science Approaches with the Southampton Emerging Therapies and Technologies Centre and the Wessex Secure Data Environment

The Southampton Emerging Therapies and Technologies (SETT) Centre, in partnership with NIHR ARC Wessex, has awarded support to four early-stage data science projects.

This is a collaborative initiative to develop and test data science approaches addressing compound pressures across health and care systems. The project aims to build analytic capacity by bringing together clinical, academic, and data science expertise from University Hospital Southampton (UHS), the University of Southampton, and other regional partners with a focus on 4 use cases.

Central to this work is the Wessex Secure Data Environment (SDE),  part of a national programme to provide safe, secure access to clinical data. The SETT data team curates and onboards health data into the SDE, enabling secure and effective data analysis.

• Substance Use Disorder: Analysing electronic health records to understand how substance use impacts hospital services and to inform more effective interventions.

• Neurocritical Blood Pressure Control: Comparing the effectiveness of two drugs (labetalol and nicardipine) in managing blood pressure in very unwell patients, with a focus on clinical outcomes and resource efficiency.

• Liver Monitoring in IBD: Assessing liver function test monitoring in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) to improve early detection of liver disease and clinical pathways.

• Digital Tools for Rare Liver Disease: Evaluating how digital tools can improve care and screening for primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), a rare and progressive liver disease.
  

This initiative has a focus on improvements in patient care and resource efficiency, while also building data science capacity to enable innovation  in health and care delivery.