Data specialists, technicians and clinicians have been urged to collaborate in a project aimed at placing Scotland at the forefront of cancer care. The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) reiterated its call today for entrants to the Cancer Innovation Challenge, a £425,000 competition to find innovative solutions to recording and integrating data which could lead to cutting-edge care solutions.

The Cancer Innovation Challenge is seeking applicants who believe they could discover solutions in several fields related to digital health information. These include the analysis of unstructured data, and data driven solutions in: clinical decisions; service improvement; recruitment for clinical trials and precision medical approaches.

The project aims to encourage bodies from industry, the public, and various stakeholders in the health sector to collaborate together on current NHS research on cancer in Scotland. Ultimately, it is hoped that these partnerships will demonstrate the ability to use large-scale NHS data for complex analysis, while also encouraging more discussion on the use of synthetic data.

Entrants to the competition can also expect the support of three of Scotland’s leading innovation centres – The Data Lab, the Digital Health and Care Institute (DHI) and Stratified Medicine Scotland (SMS) – who are partnering the project.

Those interested have one week left to register for the competition – which closes on Friday 27^th October – and can do so here.