A database for the NIHR Innovation Observatory

What our client needed

The NIHR Innovation Observatory brings together data scientists, evidence synthesis analysts and text mining specialists to observe and report on health innovation in the UK and beyond utilising next generational digital analytics. They required a bespoke application and database to manage the horizon scanning activity of the Innovation Observatory and related outputs. 

The system needed to integrate with an existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM. There was an existing database but a complete restructure of the data was required.

The team needed to be able to identify medical innovations at an early stage in their development and then monitor progress towards licensing. Feeds of data from obtained by text mining clinical trial registries across the world as well as commercial data sources would need to be consumed.

Challenges

Fundamental to the Innovation Observatory is the concept of a medical technology. This is not just defined by the intervention (which could be a pharmaceutical or device) but also by the condition is is being used to treat and indeed the population being treated. It is technologies that can be innovative and that are licensed by government authorities. Decisions then need to be made by NICE whether to offer these within the NHS. Defining a technology was a key challenge in the system development.

Incoming trial data had to be matched to existing technology records. Accuracy in this was essential, so the system needed to find and score potential matches and display these side by side with the incoming data, allowing analysts to efficiently decide if the technology was new or this was additional information relevant to an existing technology.

Data from the system and from the Dynamics CRM needed to be linked. The new database needed to be able to generate documents such as briefing notes for the stakeholders and delivered via the CRM. Help was also needed to expose the data to Power BI for dashboards and reporting.

How we were able to deliver it

We went through a detailed discovery process with Innovation Observatory staff to ensure we had a complete understanding of the concepts and workflows. We subcontracted a Dynamics partner to make improvements and modifications to the existing CRM. We set up integrations to ensure that a two way synchronisation was in place for data that needed to be available both in the CRM and in the new bespoke database.

Further integrations with an in-house text mining system and a suite of commercial data feeds were developed.