Détente sells gene database system to UK hospital

Sydney-based clinical systems company Détente Systems has scored a major international coup, selling its gene database system to the prestigious Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in the UK.

"We had the experience and we were able to work with the GOSH staff to offer something the big international companies couldn't do. We offered a more commercial and attractive package than the other six that originally bid for the project," said Détente managing director Alex Anderson.

Anderson said the web-based installation would enable the hospital's 3000 clinicians to immediately view test data on the ward following a lab test on child patients.

GOSH children's hospital is seen as a world leader in paediatrics, and receives DNA samples for testing from all over the world. It also holds data on around half a million patients. Its pioneering research and extensive data banks help identify and monitor child patients with a propensity for genetically inherited diseases.

The complexity of the data offered special challenges to Détente, which rewrote a special security module to ensure integrity, together with accessibility, of data.

"We see molecular genetics moving into a semi-forensic role, but we have to ensure that security is incredibly tight. The amount of data even across different members of the same family is huge," noted Anderson.

The GBP100,000 project took several weeks to install and commission, and was overlaid on an existing Détente system which GOSH was already using.

"As an eminent centre for research we are currently using data going back as far as 1988 -- we don't intend to archive," said Peter Miller, GOSH pathology systems manager.

"One patient's record can hold information on as many as 10,000 episodes and each different test can have 20-30 reference sites so you can tell the degree of sophistication needed," he added.

Miller said GOSH needed a system with a robust, extremely reliable and flexible database, combined with high performance transaction processing. The Détente solution stores data in a multidimensional structure -- ideal for complex laboratory data that needs to be accessed quickly.

The genetics application runs on an HP clustered PC server, and can be used by 130 workstations in the labs, and accessed via the web by all clinical staff throughout the hospital.

"This deal gives us a real edge," said Anderson. "It is a coup for us, and we are small enough to react rapidly. We are working on the edge of the bioinformatics [world] and see molecular genetics spreading to wider and wider lab disciplines in future.

"We need to accommodate that," he added.