A visit to our Canadian Users

A visit to

our Canadian Users

Last month Jen Peach, Knowledge Team Manager, Ben Grace, Client Manager, and our Head of Operations and Delivery, Baljinder Gill took a trip over to Canada to visit some of our Canadian users. They visited EDGE Lead Admins from The 3CTN Coordinating Centre in Toronto and the Juravinski Cancer Centre in Hamilton. Ben and Bal also visited the Lead Admins from Alberta Innovates in Calgary.

Jen and Ben provided two full days of joint training sessions for the new Lead Admins and finance teams for University Health Network (UHN) and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Jen, Ben, and Bal also visited both UHN and Sunnybrook locations in Toronto to discuss the use of EDGE within the organisations.

Ben and Bal visited the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary where they completed further training for end-users, Lead Admins, and the finance team.

Pictured: James Schoales, Portfolio Data Analyst - 3CTN, Baljinder Gill, Head of Operations and Delivery - CIRU, UoS, Stephen Sundquist, Executive Director - 3CTN, Rebecca Xu, Portfolio and Informatics Manager - 3CTN, Jen Peach, Knowledge Team Manager, and Ben Grace, Client Manager - CIRU, UoS 

An EDGE International visit

An EDGE

International visit

Last month, our Director, Professor James Batchelor and Head of Trading Services, Tim Gibbons, were invited by the Rosemary Bryant Institute at the University of South Australia to speak to the University and representatives from the States Health Groups about their experiences of working across health research in the UK and some of the international successful research programmes they have worked on. Tim and James covered many topics including Health Data Platforms, Secure Data Environments (SDE), Open Plan Care, Hospital Eco-Systems, Accelerating Cancer Clinical Trial Activity and Data Squishing for Fun (a personal passion of James!) The Rosemary Bryant Institute are a close partner of CIRU as both are centres that host Sri Lankan Research Fellows from the Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health, a collaboration which spans over 10,000 miles.

From Adelaide, James and Tim travelled to Auckland, New Zealand, to meet with our long-standing EDGE users and lead champions at the University of Auckland (Waipapa Taumata Rau) and Te Whatu Ora Te Toka Tumai Auckland. On a round-robin tour, they met with groups from the top to bottom of the country including Waikato, Otago, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin. They discussed the benefits and pitfalls of digital transformation in the health service and the advantages leveraged across the UK from close collaboration, as well as the advancements that have been achieved in using single platforms within a research office geography and a shared approach to research.

James and Tim were of course accompanied by EDGEY, who very much enjoyed himself on his South Australia and New Zealand tour!

EDGE International

A year with

EDGE International

It has been an eventful 15 months for everyone to say the least. I could say more but it would only go to repeat what has been said already by so many. Although Covid has dominated every facet of our working lives, there are still many achievements we can talk about. I felt now would be a good time to write a post to share some of the stories from the last year of the EDGE International groups, a little bit of a ‘Christmas Round Robin’ if you will, but in June!

Our colleagues in Canada have been working with the C17 network, a collaborative group of paediatric haematology, oncology, and stem cell transplant program centres, to implement EDGE into their programme of work. Early to join have been the Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto and Montreal Children’s Hospital and more recently Stollery Children Hospital and Alberta Children Hospital. This now brings the total number of Canadian Centres using EDGE to 34 which has come about through a lot of hard work and dedication from our partners out there. With the remote monitoring case study now available (see previous blog post) Canada is exploring how this can be used across the regional network groups.

In New Zealand, we have also welcomed the Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland to the programme along with their colleagues in Blood and Cancer at ADHB and the University of Auckland. All are looking at how EDGE can break down siloed working and bring together common systems and standards across their region with other district health boards keeping a close eye on how EDGE will evolve across the region.

Our most recent newcomer to the group is the CTRU at K. J. Somaiya Hospital and Research centre in Mumbai, India who started their training in early May and are getting ready to run with EDGE. This is a really exciting new group for the EDGE team to be working with and the CTRU have some great plans ahead.

In combination with our exploratory projects and Pilots in South Africa, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Australia we now have a whopping 3000 international research studies being run through EDGE which is phenomenal.

While the international groups joining EDGE continue to grow a big thanks should be extended from our Team at CIRU to yours! The generosity of our subscriber base in the UK and Canada to share their experience, hard work, learning, and achievements with our new international colleagues must not go unacknowledged. The willingness to collaborate and share to help those starting from scratch is what the EDGE programme is best known for. In the absence of a 2021 EDGE Conference and the ability to gather in person, our subscribers have embraced working together online. A community of like-minded friends looking to help one another achieve a common goal. Thank You.