Going global

Swansea University technology set to revolutionise Australian healthcare

Technology developed by a team at Swansea University Medical School that enables the secure storage and sharing of large scale data for research is set to revolutionise healthcare in Australia.

November 5, 2018

Technology developed by a team at Swansea University Medical School that enables the secure storage and sharing of large scale data for research is set to revolutionise healthcare in Australia.

The Helix platform, based at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, will provide approved researchers with ground breaking access to complex sets of healthcare data with the vision of improving the care provided by health practitioners to patients.

Helix – which uses Swansea University’s Health Informatics Group’s world-leading secure data infrastructure – Secure eResearch Platform (SeRP) – will utilise data from hundreds of clinical trials, medical and population health studies and patient registries to offer approved researchers ground-breaking access to complex healthcare data to better understand a host of disease burdens faced by Australia including cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, heart disease and mental illness.

SeRP is a high powered, safe and secure e-research platform that allows data owners and researchers to store, access, share, link and analyse data at scale, in a fully governed highly secure environment, whilst maintaining full control of the data at all times.

Professor David Ford, Head of the Health Informatics Group at Swansea University Medical School, said: “Data is the foundation for almost all research.  However, too often much of the energies of research teams are focused on the collection of data, rather than on its analysis and interpretation.

Providing secure access to carefully curated data resources through infrastructure such as SeRP and Monash’s Helix platform, enables researchers to concentrate on analysing the rich and highly scaled data resources within the platform, providing research-based insights quicker, more efficiently and more safely than ever before.

The privacy and security of patient data is our highest priority. SeRP has gained multiple external accreditations for both privacy protection and technology security, making it the best in class at a UK and international level. We are excited to share our technology and experience with Monash University so that they too will be able to demonstrate they take their responsibilities to patients whilst still delivering high-impact, highly-scaled research.

Monash University is the perfect collaborator for us. As a large and highly respected university which is well known for having a powerful and internationally acclaimed research base, we are delighted to work with them to help them manage, use and share patient data to support to drive forward high quality research. Together, we will help deliver an infrastructure that will make a real difference.”

Read the full story here.

News & Analysis

by Editor