INSIGHT: The Health Data Research Hub for Eye Health

There is an increasing demand for ‘Big Data’ to enable innovation in health technologies and improve patient care. INSIGHT-DIH creates an NHS-academic-industry partnership to make anonymised datasets accessible and provide critical services that respond to user needs (patients/industry/other), including ‘real-world evidence’ and ‘smart’ clinical trials for new drugs or devices, and accelerating AI-algorithm development for the NHS and beyond.
INSIGHT-DIH is focused on eye disease and its application to wider health, including diabetes C19and dementia. INSIGHT-DIH turns routine eye imaging - currently >25million/yr (UK)- into an exceptional asset for innovation as a convenient, uniquely valuable health snapshot.
INSIGHT-DIH uses anonymised large-scale data and advanced analytics to bring new clinical insights: from detection, diagnosis and referral, to new treatments and personalised healthcare. INSIGHT-DIH unlocks this opportunity by pairing unique anonymised data assets to hubs of expertise where patients and clinicians can, with industry, more efficientlyexplore the safety and use of new AI systems. This will accelerate the pace with which AI is able to translate to real patient benefit for the NHS and accelerate innovation across all sectors."

T he INSIGHT Digital Innovation Hub (INSIGHT-DIH) focuses on Eye Disease and ‘Oculomics’ , a first-of-its-kind linkage of routinely collected, anonymised high-dimensional eye-imaging data from the major ocular diseases impacting blindness to wider health including diabetes, dementia, cardiovascular disease and inflammation/immunity . INSIGHT-DIH partners NHS (University Hospitals Birmingham NHSFT, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHSFT), charities (Action Against Age-related Macular Degeneration) and industry (Roche, Google), to enable innovation and transform patient care.
Eye/vision problems affect 1.3 billion people worldwide but is highly amenable to digital innovation. In particular, ocular imaging can be used to provide novel insight into both eye and systemic health (“oculomics”), from childhood to old age. The INSIGHT-DIH network gathers data from across the whole of the UK health sector - NHS clinics, imaging diagnostics, laboratories, primary care/optometry – which will be linked and anonymised within the DIH to build the first holistic data-record combining routine systemic and eye health data with unparalleled high-order retinal imaging centred on patient benefit.
This positions the INSIGHT-DIH as an ideal exemplar for making the NHS ‘AI-ready’ . Eyecare data is standardised, large-scale (10% of all NHS appointments; >25 million scans/yr), and with proven suitability for artificial intelligence (AI) health applications (e.g. automated retinal diagnosis).
INSIGHT-DIH will support innovation, making existing inaccessible datasets discoverable , and bringing scale and efficiency to dataset aggregation and curation of anonymised routinely collected data , utilising our existing UK network.
We will address the ‘implementation gap’, with NHS partners being accelerated in digital maturity to AI-ready work-flows.
Disease-focused image-linked datasets respond to NHS/industry needs and DIH priorities:
(1) diabetes and diabetic eye disease;
(2) age-related macular degeneration ;
(3) dementia;
(4) community cohort for AI-intervention development/evaluation to improve screening and access to care.
Datasets will be scaled towards national coverage.
Additional services include: rapid-response real world evidence (RWE); ‘smart clinical trial’ capability for pharmacological/device/AI-interventions; and ‘clinical/technical Faculties’ of domain experts.

INSIGHT-DIH is underpinned by public trust and co-development, with a further £1 million investment in public and patient involvement and engagement (PPIE) as part of this bid, and creation of a Data Trust (Open Data Institute; AAAMD). From first contact to project completion, we will ensure excellence in service, with a view to sustainable partnerships, value return to all parties and a transformation in patient care."