Professor Jamil Mayet and Dr Amit Kaura named recipients of Graham-Dixon Award

Imperial awards first Graham-Dixon Excellence Award for research reducing unnecessary hospital admissions in acute chest pain cases.

Professor Jamil Mayet and Dr Amit Kaura have been named the first recipients of the Graham-Dixon Excellence Award in Translational Cardiovascular Clinical Research, recognising their leadership of a high-impact project aimed at reducing unnecessary hospital admissions for patients presenting with suspected acute coronary syndrome (ACS). 

Established in partnership with the Graham-Dixon Charitable Trust, the new award provides up to £200,000 over two years to support research that bridges the gap between discovery and clinical application. It was created to accelerate the development and implementation of clinically relevant innovations that deliver measurable patient benefit, and forms part of Imperial College London’s broader strategy to drive research translation and health system impact. 

The project was selected for its strong implementation focus, robust data foundations, and clear pathway to near-term patient benefit. The award panel commended the proposal’s clinical relevance, its thoughtful integration of digital infrastructure, and its potential to deliver scalable improvements to patient care. 

“This award reflects exactly the kind of research the Trust sought to support—ambitious, patient-focused, and rooted in clinical need,” said Professor Mary Ryan, Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) and Chair of the award panel. “This project combines digital innovation with practical implementation expertise and has the potential to make a meaningful difference in frontline care within a short timeframe.” 

Targeting a major source of NHS pressure 

Acute chest pain is among the most frequent causes of emergency department attendance in the UK, with more than a million presentations annually. While a large proportion of these patients are ultimately found not to have suffered a myocardial infarction, limitations in discharge confidence and support tools result in high rates of precautionary admissions—often contributing to avoidable bed occupancy and increased system strain. 

The study will evaluate the implementation of a clinical decision support (CDS) alert embedded within NHS electronic health records (EHR). The alert is triggered when patients meet validated early rule-out criteria for myocardial infarction, prompting clinicians to consider discharge based on real-time troponin results and national guidance.

The intervention will be rolled out across five London NHS hospitals and evaluated using a pre–post design, with an expected sample size of over 12,000 patients. The project builds on prior work through the NIHR Health Informatics Collaborative, which identified significant variability in discharge practices despite existing rule-out thresholds. 

Silent evaluation of an AI-enabled model 

In parallel, the study will assess the performance of Rapid-RO, a machine learning-based tool trained on multi-site NHS data (>50,000 patients) to predict the absence of ACS using routinely available features, including biomarkers and comorbidities. While the model will not influence clinical decisions during the current phase, it will be run in real time in a ‘silent evaluation’ mode, enabling comparison with standard care and informing the design of a future cluster-randomised trial. 

Early validation data suggest that Rapid-RO significantly reduces false negative rates compared to troponin-only thresholds, with potential for safer, more efficient patient triage in high-throughput acute care environments. 

Supporting scale-up of real-world clinical innovation 

The study will be jointly led by Professor Jamil Mayet, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, and Dr Amit Kaura, Co-Principal Investigator, Honorary Clinical Lecturer in Cardiology at Imperial College London and Senior Specialist Registrar at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. 

The award will fund a full-time research nurse and a data engineer to support clinical implementation and continuous data monitoring, leveraging key enablers such as iCARE TRE and strong partnerships across the North West London Integrated Care System. 

“This funding will accelerate the implementation of real-time clinical feedback to support decision making,” said Professor Mayet. “We hypothesise that this will enable more patients to be reassured and discharged home at an early stage, following presentation to one of our emergency departments with chest pain.

The grant will be used to embed a feedback system into the North West London electronic healthcare record that can be used to enable serial improvements in the feedback system to be developed, which can then be rolled out nationally and internationally. We are very grateful to the Trustees of the Graham-Dixon Award for their support.” 

This project exemplifies the type of research the Graham-Dixon Award is designed to support: data-informed, implementation-ready, and positioned to deliver measurable patient benefit within a two-year horizon. The Trustees commented: “We are delighted to support this important new award in translational cardiovascular research and warmly congratulate the inaugural recipients.” 

Advancing Imperial’s leadership in digital cardiovascular medicine 

The award reinforces Imperial’s institutional priorities around health system innovation, AI-enabled clinical pathways, and responsible deployment of digital tools in frontline care. The team’s programme aligns closely with strategic ambitions across the NIHR Health Informatics Collaborative, iCARE, and Imperial’s broader work on evidence-based adoption of clinical AI. 

Our aim is to evaluate how early ACS rule-out strategies can be enhanced by machine learning tools, to support clinicians in making faster, safer discharge decisions in the future. Dr Amit Kaura Honorary Clinical Lecturer at Imperial’s NHLI

"Our work is focused on building scalable, real-world solutions that improve outcomes for patients and ease pressure on emergency services,” said Dr Kaura.

“We’re embedding real-time decision support into NHS systems and evaluating how AI can help identify patients at very low risk of ACS using routinely collected data. Receiving the Graham-Dixon Award is a powerful example of what can be achieved when clinical need, digital innovation, and implementation science come together. I’m incredibly grateful for their support in enabling this research.”

Plans for the next call for applications to the Graham-Dixon Excellence Award will be announced later this year.