The challenge of unstructured EHRs in the NHS

Organising electronic healthcare records (EHRs) from across multiple healthcare systems is a challenge across many NHS trusts. Here's how Kings College Hospital solved the challenge, and delivered positive patient outcomes as a result.

In March 2020, Kings College Hospital, London, was facing a surge in admissions triggered by the Covid-19 virus. But in the early days of the pandemic, there was still a huge amount of uncertainty surrounding the disease. Clinicians weren’t even certain what to call it. Some patient records referred to Coronavirus, some to Covid, and some to other variations on the name, making it difficult, if not impossible, to correlate the link.

According to Professor James Teo, Clinical Director of AI and Data, Professor of Neurology, King’s College Hospital, “With so many ways of expressing words in patient records, there was a risk that we couldn’t keep track of basic information such as how many people were infected with the virus, how sick they were and what treatments they were on.”

Patient information from multiple sources into a single data warehouse

In the U.K., the issue is complicated by the loose structure of electronic healthcare records which comprise multiple data formats stored in numerous healthcare systems. But Professor Teo and his team were prepared. In 2016, they developed and launched a revolutionary data storage and analysis solution called CogStack.

Simply put, CogStack consolidates patient information from multiple sources into a single data warehouse. An advanced search layer, powered by Elasticsearch, combined with natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), enables clinicians to extract meaningful information from unstructured data.

At the start of the pandemic, this let the hospital quickly search patient records so that it could keep track of confirmed diagnoses and patients exhibiting symptoms. The results were shared with other hospitals and healthcare providers so that they could better prepare for the spread of the virus and provide accurate information to the public.