NIHR / NOCRI Information Systems Workshop - Part 5 - The Oncology Research Information System (ORIS)

We were fortunate enough to speak to Prof. Peter Parker (Cancer Theme Lead, NIHR BRC at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust & King’s College London) prior to the day beginning in earnest and he is as approachable and engaged in person as you could hope - and, having previously blogged about ORIS we were  really looking forward to getting the inside scoop on the system.

IDBS have pulled this system together using Custodix for pseudonymisation, ORION for integration (also see this interesting eHealth Insider article on ORION's acquisition of Microsoft Amalga), HTB ETS(Oralce Healthcare Transaction Base Enterprise Terminology Service) as a terminology service and Inforsense ClinicalSense for the clinical data- the set-up includes a bespoke software toolbox for analysis and the system is currently in UAT at Guy's and St. Thomas's.

To fill you in on what the system does - here is the abstract for Prof. Parker's talk:

"ORIS is an IT platform that enables the routine extraction of consented, structured clinical data (notes, images, etc), its pseudonymisation and export into a research data store, from which patient cohorts can be selected and their information linked to molecular data derived from research. The development of ORIS has been driven by the compelling need to enrich the value of the extensive molecular analysis of patients and in the case of oncology of the somatic changes associated with the development and progression of cancer. It is expected that the benefits derived from a deeper understanding of the relationship between biomolecular events and response to treatment will be improved early detection (selective screening), new interventions, better patient stratification, improvement in patient quality of life and better outcomes."