Figure 2. CogStack health service use cases

CogStack can facilitate the effective use of EMR data in several ways:

• Enabling free-text search for EMRs and relationships between entities in the text
• Timely risk monitoring and alerting
• Presenting a visual timeline of patient documents to clinicians
• Improving patient recruitment into clinical trials.

CogStack was developed by Bioinformatics and Health Informatics Researchers at Kings College London. The platform has been successfully deployed and implemented in multiple NHS services in the UK and its implementation is being scaled across the NHS.

Monash University have established a collaboration with Kings College London to adapt CogStack to the Australian context.

Project: National Learning Health System (LHS) Data Management Platform

This innovative project received $1.9M in MRFF funding to implement CogStack within our Health services.  This allowed Healthcare Leaders and Researchers to harness the power of Health information in electronic Health records to improve Healthcare quality, health outcomes and enable innovative research.

The project was a joint collaboration between:

In this project, CogStack was adapted for the Australian context with the aim to deploy this platform within the IT environment of our Health Service Partners.

The Monash Partners Learning Health System (LHS) guided three project work streams for the implementation of CogStack (Figure 2). The first Health Centres to pilot the system included:

Alfred Health utilised CogStack and its NLP/AI algorithms for clinical trial participant identification.

Peninsula Health (National Centre for Healthy Ageing) used the CogStack tool to help detect conditions such as dementia that are often poorly documented and difficult to identify in structured electronic health records.

Outcome Health explored alternatives to their current data management system and implemented CogStack to further investigate opportunities to securely use unstructured data and unlock the analytical benefits through the implementation of NLP.

Their work was supported by and developed in conjunction with Monash University.

The Monash Partners Learning Health System has underpinned the systems and infrastructure for this project and so has increased the speed and quality of Health System responses. This initiative provides exemplars of how this can work in the real world:

• Key stakeholders have worked together to support the implementation of innovative data infrastructure (CogStack) into diverse healthcare settings.


• Stakeholders have worked together in a co-design and co-development model guided and supported by the LHS.


• This project has been prioritised by the health services across a range of settings including:
  • Aged Care
  • Hospital (Acute & Ambulatory Care)
  • Primary Care


• Through the co-production process in the context of the LHS we have focused on the priorities and problems of most importance to the health service so it is directly applicable to end-user needs.


• The people that work in health have informed and codeveloped this work in a non-competitive environment.


• We’ve applied implementation research approaches to ensure research directly informs and underpins delivery of health impact.