High speed cancer analysis platform for Public Health England

With the easy-to-use portal now in place, there are already some 600 authorised National Health Service (NHS) users able to quickly find out how a particular group of patients are responding to treatment, how well a particular trust is performing in terms of treatment, and how cancer rates are changing among different socio-economic groups. That in turn will help hospital teams to improve treatment regimes and patient outcomes.

“Self-service reporting has marked a huge improvement in the quality of support we provide to healthcare professionals,” commented Helen Luff, Business Intelligence Manager at NCRAS. “Via our previous portal, users could view some aggregate measures, but had to submit requests for detailed and specific data to our analytical team and wait for the results.

“With the new portal built on SAS, users can generate most reports independently, obtain instant insight, and output their findings as a PDF. Users have access to much more granular data, whilst still maintaining patient confidentiality, so they can answer highly specific questions.”

It means reports can exactly meet the tailored needs of different stakeholder groups. User requirements that had been on the wish list for 12-18 months, can now be used to generate reports within a few hours.

Easy access to high speed data analysis will enable doctors to make better-informed decisions about patient care. The NCRAS collects detailed information on more than 300,000 cancer cases every year, including type of cancer, treatment options, pathology and haematology reports, imaging data and medical records.

With this highly granular information, practitioners on the frontline of cancer treatment can quickly discover what treatments have been the most successful in previous similar cases, giving them a better chance of determining an effective plan for patients. Team leaders can also see how their trust’s patient outcomes perform against other regions, and amend their treatment patterns accordingly.

“Half of people in the UK will develop cancer at some point in their life, so improving cancer care and identifying new treatments are goals that touch all of us,” commented Charles Senabulya, Vice President & Country Manager, SAS UK & Ireland.

“Public Health England’s NCRAS platform is a fantastic resource for medical practitioners, and SAS is proud to be involved in making the system as efficient and user-friendly as possible. Reports can now be generated within hours, and professionals can get the insight they need quickly. We look forward to taking this project forward and continuing to support the best possible cancer care in the UK.”