CASE STUDY :
How a single data strategy empowered Genomics England to sequence the future of British healthcare
As Matt Hancock MP , Secretary of State for Health and Social Care , noted , “ The future of healthcare will be more personalised , more predictive , more preventative – using data to target those who need support to lead healthier lives .”
The 100,000 Genomes Project , run by Genomics England and funded by the UK Department of Health and Social Care , is just one example of the truth of that statement . Initially created to sequence 100,000 genomes to better understand rare diseases and cancers , the success of the project led to its expansion to sequence up to five million genomes in the next five years , bringing with it an extortionate amount of data .
Telstra Purple was tasked to provide the right data strategy in order to bring together fragmented data sets , ensure privacy and security for sensitive and confidential information , and to provide insights into costefficiencies to help as many people as possible .
Genomics England ultimately needed to transform from a research organisation to a big data one . They were understandably spending a lot of money on IT technology each month and so Telstra Purple worked with them to provide enhanced visibility and access to the data to make their decisions quicker and more accurately .
As a direct result of the partnership , project coordination became much more efficient , as Bullen explains . “ The people managing the projects were able to operate more efficiently when they saw that there was overlap in terms of research work . In addition to this , we helped Genomics England reduce their IT costs because we were able to map projects and application activity to the cloud and IT billing costs . We were able to cut out duplicate and redundant cloud and IT infrastructure to reduce the costs quite significantly – especially important for a mainly public-funded organisation .”
207 www . technologymagazine . com