The Allan Lab
The Allan Lab is Health and Care Jersey’s clinical innovation sandbox, based at Jersey General Hospital and created in 2019 by Consultant Cardiologist Dr Andrew Mitchell and Dr Austin Gibbs, now Chief Clinical Innovation Officer for Health and Care Jersey.
The Lab exists to answer one question safely: does this technology help our patients and our staff? Every project runs with information governance and clinical safety in place from day one, and every pilot carries a baseline, an endpoint and a stop/go decision. What works gets scaled. What doesn’t gets stopped, and we say so.
That discipline has produced a record. AI clinical decision support piloted here over eighteen months has since been taken up by the European Society of Cardiology and deployed internationally. Digital consent, co-developed with the Heart Team, is now rolling out across Health and Care Jersey. AI imaging tools have been evaluated properly before any question of adoption. Virtual and augmented reality have been tested in real procedures and published in the peer-reviewed literature.
Alongside the Lab sits a live research programme run with the Jersey Heart Team: nine active studies in heart failure, atrial fibrillation and prevention, an island-wide heart failure registry, and cardiac MRI capability built on Jersey through collaboration with the University of Oxford.
Why Jersey
Most of what makes clinical research and digital adoption difficult is fragmentation. Jersey is not fragmented. It is a single-payer, single-provider jurisdiction of around 103,000 people, with one acute hospital, one health regulator, one health minister and one direction of travel for the patient record. Whole-population studies, registry research and long-term follow-up are administratively straightforward here in a way they are not in larger systems.
As a Crown Dependency, Jersey sits outside both the United Kingdom and the European Union, with its own legislature and its own data protection authority. Its law is GDPR-aligned, which gives international partners a familiar floor, while retaining the ability to move on specific reforms at a pace larger jurisdictions cannot manage. The island is also among the most connected places in the world, with gigabit fibre to every home and full IoT coverage, and it is forty-five minutes’ flying time from London.
Working with us
We work with clinical teams, universities and industry partners who want technology developed and evaluated properly rather than simply deployed. Companies developing digital health technology, or considering Jersey as a place to research, test or geolocate part of their business, are welcome to make contact.