What is the Clinical Informatics Service (CIS)?
The Clinical Informatics Service (CIS) is a new service set up by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, with support from the Maudsley Charity. It brings together clinical, technical and research expertise from the Trust, the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London.
The CIS team works closely with the Clinical Records Interactive Search (CRIS) team in the NIHR Maudsley BRC, as well as with CogStack. The CIS supports the NIHR Maudsley BRC Informatics theme by using data-driven insights to transform clinical care and address inequalities.
The service aims to develop our visualisation platform Locating Useful Clinical Information (LUCI), to support clinicians and service planners in using data to:
- Release time to care
- Identify and address unmet needs
- Motivate action on inequalities
At the Trust level, the service aims to:
- Transition LUCI from the current proof-of-concept version, VIEWER, to a sustainable, operational service within the Trust.
- Develop the Trust's capacity in Population Health Management.
- Build clinical informatics expertise and wider data literacy in our workforce.
What is LUCI?
LUCI is a clinical insights tool that presents clinicians and managers with data from the Trust's electronic patient record to help them make informed decisions about the clinical care of their patients and the service delivery models that underlie them. Using the expertise and successful Natural Language Processing applications developed by the CRIS team over the last ten years, LUCI can:
- Extract information from free-text entries made by clinicians as well as structured forms, making this data easier to access and use.
- Summarise patients' data across caseloads, care pathways and populations and show individuals' longitudinal histories.
VIEWER, the proof-of-concept it is based on, is currently used by healthcare professionals across the Trust in a range of pilots including for medication review, management of physical health checks, caseload management in community mental health teams and monitoring equality of access to psychological therapies.
The VIEWER proof-of-concept was designed in a collaboration between Trust clinicians, CRIS informaticians and the CogStack team. With funding from Maudsley Charity, the CIS will be transitioning LUCI into a fully supported service over the next two years: working with frontline users to ensure the dashboards work for them, improving the underlying data models and creating new visualisations guided by the needs of clinicians and services.
