iCARE High Performance Analysis Environment

The iCARE Environment is a cloud-based, big data analytics platform. It allows clinicians, researchers and data scientists to access large-scale, highly curated databases for the purposes of research, clinical audit and service evaluation. The iCARE Environment has a number of data analysis tools available, such as Python, R and STATA.

The iCARE Environment sits entirely within the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (ICHT) infrastructure. This, combined with the iCARE Team’s robust method of data de-identification, make the Environment an incredibly secure platform. The fact that it can be accessed remotely using the Trust’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure means that researchers can perform their work remotely, and are therefore not constrained by location.

Linkage to Whole Systems Integrated Care (WSIC) Data

As the iCARE Environment holds both ICHT data and Northwest London WSIC data, linkage can be performed between the two datasets all whilst keeping the data completely de-identified. This allows researchers to examine both primary and secondary care data for patients in the region, thus broadening the spectre of research questions that can be answered.

New Database Curation

The iCARE Environment allows for the curation of new, bespoke patient datasets. By expanding the datasets that are available to researchers on the Environment, the iCARE team can widen the scope of potential research.

Care Information Exchange – Patient Electronic Health Record

We are connected to the CIE enabling us to carry out research that engages directly with patients.

Linked Images Dataset

The iCARE Team are currently in the process of linking routinely captured patient data with de-identified clinical images for the same patients. The iCARE Environment’s robust capacity allows for a large amount of images to be stored on the platform and accessed by researchers.

Linked Tissue Bank Datasets

The iCARE Environment will also hold the de-identified datasets linked to the Imperial College Healthcare Tissue Bank. For more information on this, please visit the Tissue Banking and Genomics page here.