Overview

EMIS Group is the leading primary care software provider in the UK, with more than 39 million patient records entrusted to its systems. The company was founded more than 30 years ago, but its mission has remained the same - to develop the best possible technology to help healthcare professionals and ultimately, improve patient health. Today, EMIS serves 10,000 organizations across every major healthcare setting and securely stores millions of National Health Service (NHS) records.

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

The challenge for EMIS — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic – had been finding the best way to make healthcare data and analytics available to providers and research organizations, in a way that’s secure, cost-effective, high-performing, and scalable. The pandemic heightened this challenge for two reasons: 1) over 39 million patient records sat in data silos and were difficult to access, 2) the data teams had to adapt to the rapid influx of information coming in so healthcare professionals could understand the needs of their patients and keep them safe during unprecedented times.

The Solution

Before the pandemic came along, Richard Jarvis, Chief Analytics Officer at EMIS, recognized that they needed broader and more flexible infrastructure to give scientists and hospitals critical patient data. As a solution, Jarvis and his team built a cloud-based analytics platform, EMIS-X Analytics, that allows care providers to surface information quickly and at scale. Powered by Starburst, EMIS-X Analytics has the querying capability that allows EMIS to continuously stream clinical data into a cloud data lake, ensuring that it has all the latest information – including patient medications, allergies, symptoms, and more.

The results

EMIS-X Analytics, powered by Starburst, provides both the secure and seamless access to data needed for clinicians to generate meaningful insights. The analytics solution provides real-world evidence from patient records that makes it easier for services to be tailored to clinical needs, and for research programs to develop effective treatments. As a result of deploying the EMIS-X Analytics suite, clinicians have easy access to the right information, at the right time.

Healthcare researchers are able to access the patient records they need in one search, improving data collection for better patient outcomes. Starburst’s security features anonymise patient data in a secure, approved method so clinicians can perform research without compromising patient confidentiality. This solution not only enables near-real time access to patient records that were previously difficult to access, but it changes how healthcare is delivered by accelerating data-driven insights.

​​EMIS is really proud of generating an outcome for humanity that has changed the way we treat COVID-19. They have published ground breaking research on the treatment of COVID-19 based on analytics done by Starburst on their data. They are also releasing novel papers at a rate of one every two weeks, so that is an incredibly fast rate at which we are making new scientific discoveries with this platform.

Metrics

The time to data discovery has significantly gone down. It would have previously taken 48 hours to get information to people which we can now do in four hours or less. So, the ability to consume that data that much more quickly means that you can do so many different things with it. You can do things in real time and have a big impact on the patients, and Starburst has helped us do all of this. 

With EMIS-X, the data team at Frimley Health and Care Integrated Care System was able to liberate their siloed data and use it to efficiently respond to their patient’s needs and track COVID-19 trends as they emerged. They were able to get a sense of what type of people were catching it, how it was transmitted and the severity of the positive cases in order to support health initiatives and get accurate and effective messaging to the public.

The Technology

Starburst, SQL Server, AWS React Components, Apache Superset, and Azure.

Disruptive Factor

The demand on the healthcare system is so great now, that clinicians and their patients need the support from proven solutions to drive better health outcomes. Most of the unanswered questions in medicine today can only be answered with data at a massive scale, and with the help of Starburst, EMIS is helping answer those questions by providing analytics to unlock insights from healthcare data that impacts real-life health outcomes.

Shining Moment

Richard Jarvis is really proud of generating an outcome for humanity that has changed the way we treat COVID-19 with Starburst. He led this project at EMIS, and we believe he would be most proud of discovering a way to give people a better quality of life with better outcomes – all by helping customers get more out of their data.