What the EDGE team are up to

It’s been 2 months in lockdown now and our entire department is working from home, so I thought I’d take some time to bring everyone up to speed on what the EDGE team are up to.

Firstly, it hasn’t quite been the start that we hoped for our new developer Grant, a Doctor by training, which is a unique skill set that I am sure will be very valuable. He officially started with us whilst in lockdown, so although we’ve virtually met him, many of us haven’t yet met him in person. Although in the world of remote working and geographically diverse companies, perhaps it isn’t unusual for colleagues to have never met in person?

Our team have daily meetings, and in fact these often becomes multiple daily meetings between sub-groups of us as we work on different projects. Our concentration is heavily EDGE 3 development, using this time to concentrate on designing new specifications for functionality, as well as enhancements for the current functions EDGE 2 already provides. Functions are great, however a system is not built simply on functions. Usability is a very important aspect of systems and a functionally rich application is of little use if nobody can work out how to use it, or find it so confusing or complex that they end up looking for workarounds.

Our team are doing a lot of engaging with many of you to find out how you use the system and gather as much feedback as possible, as well as using the skills and knowledge of our departmental Psychologist Kenny. He is, at this moment, integrating data analysis around how users navigate throughout the system, which functions are most used, and how users navigate to those functions. There are a multitude of different types of people who use EDGE, each with different job roles, so although the search for absolute perfection may end up being fruitless, there are certainly a lot of improvements we already have lined up.

There is currently no fixed release date for EDGE 3, although we are aiming for sometime late in 2021. As we approach that time we can start to be more specific, however until then we have a lot of problems to solve, challenges to overcome, cans of worms to open, ducks to line up and all other types of analogy. However I am confident that EDGE 3 will be the product that we all are hoping for, both in terms of functions available to users, integration possibilities to other systems, and also importantly, a technologically up-to-date framework that allows our developers to continue building new and exciting functions at speed, something which is more difficult currently in EDGE 2.

Now for the sad news. The event of the year for many people, the eminent social and educational soiree that is the yearly EDGE conference is diverging from its usually perennial perpetualness. Or in other words, we’re moving it. Whilst we are in the throws of designing and building EDGE 3, it is perhaps better that we continue to concentrate on this, and when ready, create a conference specifically around the launch of the new version. Our marcoms team, Beth, Gela and Kenny will as always keep you all informed well before the event so that you can book your tickets before they sell out.

Be sure to visit the CIRU website for more information on other work taking place in our department, to keep up to date with what we are up to, or even to browse out staff pictures and put faces to the names of people you often speak with.

My experience before joining CIRU

My experience within research has been relatively short but a varied one up to this point. I have gained unique experiences and have learnt much about research over the last 4 years. Not only is research an extremely rewarding practice to be a part of but our governments drive for the UK to lead in research for patient care and economic growth also makes for a gratified career prospect.

I first got into research after working for 9 years within many different Pharmacy departments at Southampton General Hospital. Being well aware the step up to a Pharmacy technician wasn’t for me, I knew it was time to take another route. At that time I took an opportunity within the Clinical Trials Pharmacy department as a Senior Clinical Trials Assistant. Dispensing trial drugs and accountability were key aspects of my day to day duties within that role as well as ensuring nurses received their prescription drugs on time for their patient’s appointments. Due to the importance of time windows within most CTIMP protocols, each dispensing item had a time limit from receiving the script to a final technician check. This could be very stressful at times when the pharmacy was extremely busy and as most prescriptions were not presented in advance this could not be predicted. Other essential tasks involved recouping costings from commercial studies by collating finance figures from site file accountability logs. This was very important as our department mostly relied on funding coming in from commercial trials.

After 6 months I was employed as a ‘Pharmacy Clinical Trials Co-ordinator’, an extremely rewarding role where I was solely responsible for over a million pounds worth of trial medication. Good relations and communication with PI’s, Co-Investigators and Nurses were pivotal for preparing CTIMP deliveries and prescriptions, enabling chemotherapy and other trial IVs to be made in the aseptic’s in time for patient’s appointments. As IVs all have various expiries (once made) it’s imperative my organisation skills were on point. Some medication can quickly expire, wasting thousands of pounds of stock while also holding up a treatment chair in a busy cancer clinic, in turn wasting pharmacy and research teams’ valuable time.

With a taste of research I felt it was the right time to move away from Pharmacy after 10 years and I joined the Lung Research team within the same hospital. A small team of 5 (Including myself), consisting of 2 senior nurses and 3 research assistants.

My time was split supporting senior nurses with administration duties such as updating trial site files and inputting data into ECRFs after patient visits, while the other half was assisting in coordinating 100,000 genomes project implementation into the trust. Along with this I also gained consent from patients for the TargetLung study. This would entail following patients through their standard of care journey, taking their bloods and processing bodily fluids in a lab for scientists to process. I would also collect tumour tissues from many different procedures in order to help researchers try and improve their knowledge of how the immune system works with lung diseases. As you can imagine this was an extremely insightful way of learning how laboratories, theatres and various departments work together in research.

With the above hands on experience of clinical trials on my side, it has assisted me a great deal as a Knowledge Officer at the Clinical Informatics Research Unit, in understanding what clinical research teams need to carry out their occupations effectively. The CIRU team has a great diversity of experience from all aspects of research departments which helps us solve problems and brainstorm issues efficiently with good understanding of our users. Naturally there are times when issues arise where we are not familiar, but good relationships with CRNs and the Trusts keeps the CIRU team up to date with current affairs which is helpful for running the EDGE programme.

Blog post written by Lee Pearce,
EDGE Knowledge Officer, CIRU
University of Southampton

Clinical Informatics Research Unit Update

We would like to take this opportunity to give you all an update on what is happening here at the Clinical Informatics Research Unit (CIRU). 

We would like to warmly welcome Dr Mike Head and Dr Rebecca Brown into the department. They are both Research Fellows at the University of Southampton and are currently running the ResIn study.

The Research Investments in Global Health study (ResIn) is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project previously focused on the UK research landscape and published widely on the strengths and gaps in the UK research portfolio for both infectious diseases and oncology. Levels of investment have been compared to global and national burdens of disease to gain an insight into relative levels of spend and inform priority-setting initiatives. Now, ResIn is building a global dataset and analysing funding trends and disease burdens for infectious disease research across the G20 nations and will report findings in 2018. The study, and results to date, have been presented multiple times to many high-level global health stakeholders including the World Health Organisation, European Commission and the Wellcome Trust. Findings have also been cited by others in numerous documents including journal publications and government reports.

See http://researchinvestments.org/ for more about the project.