A new partnership in Scotland aims to improve emergency cardiac care and relieve pressure on the NHS using artificial intelligence.
The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, NHS Lothian and Lenus Health have teamed up to deliver a digital health pathway, supported by Wellcome Leap, that will deploy artificial intelligence to support cardiac care in Emergency Departments.
The agreement draws on the world-class data science work at the University of Edinburgh uniquely made possible by DataLoch, which securely stores and links real-time healthcare data from both primary and secondary care settings, the expertise in digital co-design from Edinburgh Napier University, and the Lenus disease management platform, deployed across NHS Scotland, to house and operationalise the models in live point of care clinical workflows within the Emergency Department.
There are seven and a half million (one in four) annual Emergency Department visits in the UK where patients cite chest pain or severe breathlessness.
Patients arriving with these symptoms must be quickly evaluated for acute cardiac disease, the leading cause of death worldwide. However, rapid and accurate diagnosis is often challenging with acute cardiac disease frequently indistinguishable from benign conditions.
For this reason, around 20 per cent of patients receiving acute cardiac care return to the Emergency Department within 30 days of their initial attendance. This places a significant burden on NHS resources and means that the patient has been delayed receiving effective treatment.
Nick Mills, British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology at the University of Edinburgh, commented: “For patients with acute chest pain or breathlessness due to a heart attack or heart failure, early diagnosis and treatment saves lives. Unfortunately, many conditions cause these common symptoms, and the diagnosis is not always straight forward. Harnessing data and artificial intelligence to support clinical decisions has enormous potential to improve care for patients and efficiency in our busy Emergency Departments.”
By digitally delivering the most relevant clinical data and predictive analytics directly to Emergency care teams, the project aims to prevent at least one in five of those 30-day re-attendances.
Alasdair Gray, Consultant and Honorary Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh said: “Chest pain is one of the most common problems presenting to Scottish Emergency Departments. This work, being developed in collaboration with patients and NHS staff, has the potential to improve substantially the care for chest pain patients not just in the Emergency Department but also in the months following hospital discharge”.
Lenus Health helps unlock the existing health data silos to facilitate more efficient and effective care pathways, with a focus on the most challenging long-term conditions.
Paul McGinness, Chief Executive Officer of Lenus Health, added: “The Lenus disease management platform is rolled out across major health boards covering 68 per cent of the Scottish population and is uniquely able to develop and deploy both in-house and third-party AI models. Supporting frontline NHS staff and cardiac patients by delivering data and AI insights in the Emergency Department builds on the company’s ambition to reduce the acute care demands associated with long-term conditions that are currently overwhelming health systems through earlier and more efficient diagnoses of imprecise symptoms such as chest pain and breathlessness.”
