About Us

Geographic map of the West Midlands region - including Staffordshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, West Midlands Metropolitan County

Background of Health Informatics (HI) in the West Midlands

Historically, HI provision was provided through the Health Informatics Working Group (HIWG) - a collaboration between Keele Clinical Trials Unit (CTU) and CRN staff, involving the generation of searches, pop-ups, and quality assurance for these developments.

The CRN identified constraints to this arrangement in terms of the following points:

  • The CRN West Midlands team are divided to cover 3 geographical localities. The HIWG group being based in the North of the region, resulted in the majority of staff with HI skills being based in this area

  • There was an absence of a formalised, consistent approach to HI developments across the West Midlands, which on occasions resulted in a duplication of work and an overall inconsistency to the methods used to identify patients for the same study

  • The North of the West Midlands region were the only area with access to dummy clinical systems which lead to an over-reliance on the staff based in the North of the region to provide HI developments

  • The activity of the HIWG group was not confined to developments consistent with ACORD costing guidelines, in terms of only being related to tools for Patient Identification

  • National developments were also taking place in terms of the drive to develop & co-ordinate IT support for study delivery on a national scale

Initial Recommendations

Taking into account the points above, it was decided to set up a HI team across the 3 localities in the West Midlands to…

  • Better deliver/ coordinate HI in West Midlands

  • Offer a consistent, high quality service across all 3 localities

  • To up-skill the whole team to design and produce HI developments

  • Meet national vision of how HI will operate

In late 2017, the ROST group was formed

ROST

The Recruitment Optimisation Support Team (ROST) was formed with a view to meeting the HI requirements of studies recruiting patients in the West Midlands area. The team consists of representation from all 3 localities within the West Midlands with a view to initially confirming the HI development approach within the 3 areas, before subsequently working towards a single approach to be implemented region wide.

Remit of the ROST group

It was agreed that the remit of ROST would largely revolve around HI developments for purposes only related to the identification of patients for research studies, consistent with the ACORD costing guidelines. In addition, ROST would also develop “internal” tools to aid the CRN during recruitment. For example, Templates on GP clinical systems to be used by CRN Nurses for data collection purposes during research appointments and clinics, would be developed and quality assured by the ROST team.

The overall activity of the ROST group was agreed and designed to be fully coherent with the plans moving forward of the National IT Sub-group to co-ordinate HI developments on a national scale.

Primary Care Research Informatics and Digital Environment Solutions (PRIDES)

Formerly known as IT Solutions in Primary Care Research, the PRIDES service has been developed to allow the sharing of IT solutions to help enable research delivery across all LCRNs. The service will include a wider focus on key primary care digital solutions, in addition to providing a platform for sharing HI work.

Visit the national website to find more details and information about activity across other LCRNs.