A new spinout company from UCL, King’s College London, and a coalition of NHS Foundation Trusts will advance digital transformation at NHS organisations and international healthcare providers to improve patient care, patient safety and population health and research.
The company is based on software developed by a team from UCL, King’s College London, and a coalition of NHS Foundation Trusts (King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’, South London and Maudsley, and University College London Hospitals). The NIHR UCLH and Maudsley Biomedical Research Centres supported the technology in its early development.
The software, known as CogStack, can search and interpret any structured or unstructured clinical data in patient records using a type of AI call natural language processing (NLP). It removes the need for some of the manual analysis and interpretation of data by NHS staff, and can provide insights which support clinical decision-making.
The spinout company, CogStack Ltd, will build on successes of the technology already seen within NHS Trusts. The founding team comprises Professor Richard Dobson (UCL Institute of Health Informatics), with Dr Tom Searle of King’s and Professor James Teo of King’s College Hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’.
Healthcare providers using CogStack have recouped 100 per cent of their investment within two years. So far, use of the technology has led to:
- Improving patient safety at UCLH by providing alerts for patients who are ’lost-to-follow-up’ in their healthcare journey, identifying hundreds of such events to be actioned in the gastroenterology clinic
- Enhanced data efficiency and savings of £1.2 m per year in 2018 for King’s College Hospital by detecting thousands of missing records of fracture clinic procedures in only 30 minutes
- Accelerated medication reviews which saved more than two hours of work per pharmacy review at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust using CogStack AI to read and summarise records
- Improving the accuracy of clinical coding for outpatient procedures and delivering £2.5 m’in additional income to Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in 2023
- Fast-tracking recruitment for clinical trials for the 100k Genome project, which needed patients with suspected rare diseases for sequencing.
Professor Dobson, who is CogStack Chief Research Officer, said: "CogStack has the potential to transform healthcare by making sense of NHS data. It will help to inform clinical guidelines across the UK and globally, and we now want to share this to improve the functioning of the NHS and, most importantly, outcomes for patients."
Dr Nick McNally, Managing Director of Research, UCLH/UCL, said: "It’s really exciting for the UCLH BRC to be involved in developing disruptive AI technology like Cogstack. At the BRC we identified 10 years ago the amazing transformative potential of Cogstack for health care and clinical research. It’s a pleasure to support the leading expertise of Richard and the team and we are delighted to be partners in this new spin out venture which will enable further development of the technology and its wider application at scale across more health and care organisations."
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Mark Greaves
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