Faces of Digital Health
How Did London Digitize Urgent Care Plans?
Too often, patients need to repeat their medical history when in contact with different healthcare providers. Consequently, clinicians need more time to make decisions than necessary because they can’t access patient data. London managed to digitize urgent care plans and make them available across 40 NHS Trusts and 1400 GP offices.
This episode presents the Urgent Care Plan Programme, aiming at giving clinicians easy access to patients’ desires about their care, as defined in their care plan. Patients can fill out an urgent care plan at various points in their patient journey. The problem so far has been that accessing these plans by different providers was often difficult. Now the situation is improved with an introduction of a regional platform that stores urgent care plans and enables different care teams to access them when needed.
Urgent Care Plan Programme is a part of OneLondon Portfolio. OneLondon is a project that supports a vision of joined-up health and care. It is a pan-London collaboration between leaders from the 5 Integrated Care Systems in the capital.
London’s healthcare system is complex. It covers a population of 10 million people and is connecting 35 NHS Trusts and 1385 GP practices. As part of the OneLondon portfolio, the Urgent Care Plan Programme led the design and implementation of a new digital care planning solution in 2021. This solution enables Londoners to have their care, and support wishes digitally shared with healthcare professionals across the capital. By connecting all care levels, clinicians can now easily access urgent care plans to guide them in the care they provide to patients based on patient’s individual preferences.
This episode presents what urgent care plans are, why they matter, and more as explained by Dr Phil Koczan, GP in North East London, and the Chief Clinical Safety Officer for London, Dr Katherine Buxton, Consultant in Palliative Care Medicine for Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Clinical Director, Palliative and End of Life Care Strategic Clinical Network for London. They explained what the joint urgent care plan means for patients and healthcare providers in London.
More about OneLondon: https://www.onelondon.online/
More about Urgent Care Planning: https://ucp.onelondon.online/
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The topic of this episode is supported by Better is a provider of an open data digital health platform, electronic prescribing and medication administration solution, and low code tools that help you rapidly build applications that suit your needs. The company focuses on simplifying the work of health and care teams, advocates for data for life, and strives for all health data to be vendor-neutral and easily accessible.
Cancer Series Ep. 5: Digital Strategy of The Largest Single-Site Cancer Center in Europe
Medical progress is driven by research, and good research requires good data. The largest single-site cancer center in Europe and the biggest chemotherapy center in the UK – The Christie NHS Foundation Trust runs 650 clinical trials at any given time. They recently went live with a new electronic Patient Reported Outcome Measures (ePROMs) service helping to connect patients with the hospital trust through their cancer journey. As explained by Phil Bottomley, EHR Strategic Lead at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, the digitization of ePROMs is only the beginning of the digitalization process of over 600 clinical forms used in the hospital. The hospital’s digital transformation strategy is based on a data-first approach, ensuring that the used data models enable the creation of a longitudinal record. They chose openEHR specification – a product and vendor-independent specification, striving to make data independent of any software provider.
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The topic of this episode is supported by Better – a provider of an open data digital health platform, electronic prescribing and medication administration solution, and low code tools that help you rapidly build applications that suit your needs.
Cancer Series Ep. 4: Cancer is Gone, What Happens Next?
We are in the middle of a series of discussions related to cancer care, treatment improvements, data management in oncology, and the promise of AI to find the right treatment for the right patient in the fastest possible manner. As mentioned by Xose M. Fernandez, a genomicist and former chief data officer at Institute Curie, a faster diagnosis could lead to less aggressive treatment and better patient outcomes.
We covered many perspectives so far: accessibility and cost of cancer treatments in the US and Canada in the first episode, genetics, data management, and the science of cancer; we talked about AI treatments and challenges in designing clinical trials in personalized medicine.
This episode focuses on the consequences cancer diagnosis has after patients are cured. Many cancer survivors in long-term remission face restricted access to financial services because of their medical history. Some EU countries have already implemented the right to be forgotten – a right for patients not to disclose their medical history. Changes across Europe are happening slowly and given the rising incidence of cancer on the one hand, and scientific advances on the other, we need improvement in the quality of life of patients after they are cured.
In this episode, you will hear from dr. Francoise Meunier, dr. Francoise Meunier, member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine, former Director General of European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer, and a Scientific Member of the European Cancer Patient Coalition.
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Cancer Series Ep. 3: AI, Precision Oncology and Understanding Cancer (Pangea Biomed)
This is the 3rd episode in the Cancer Series.
In this episode, you’ll hear a bit about precision medicine in oncology, drug repurposing and the increasing challenges precision medicine poses for clinical trials. I spoke with Tuvik Beker, CEO of Pangea Biomed, an Israeli-based company tackling oncology drug development and treatment recommendation by not only looking at the single mutations in tumor cells, which the Pharmaceutical industry has already found targeted therapies for. Cancer treatments are evolving very rapidly, but precision and targeted therapies are still only effective in roughly 10% of cancer patients. Pangea Biomed tries to understand broader gene activation patterns inside tumor cells and recommends a therapy that would help exploit cancer cells’ defense mechanisms. As explained in simplified terms by Tuvik Beker.
Cancer Series Ep. 1: Access to Care, Financial Toxicity and Healthcare IT in Oncology
- Speaker: David J. Stewart, MD, FRCPC, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Ottawa and The Ottawa Hospital.
Cancer Series Ep.2: Cancer, Genomics and Data Science
- Speaker: Xose M. Fernandez, genomicist and up until recently the Chief Data Officer at Institut Curie in France, one of the leading medical, biological, and biophysical research centers in the world.
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Cancer Series Ep.2: Cancer, Genomics and Data Science
This is the second episode in a special series about cancer, cancer care, accessibility and technologies related to cancer care.
The first episode focused on the current state of cancer care with a speaker from Canada – David J. Stewart, MD, FRCPC, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Ottawa and The Ottawa Hospital. David explained the current state of cancer care, IT in oncology and financial toxicity of a cancer diagnosis for patients.
This, second episode, dives into genomics, the role of AI, and data science in oncology.
Speaker: Xose M. Fernandez, genomicist and up until recently the Chief Data Officer at Institut Curie in France, one of the leading medical, biological, and biophysical research centers in the world.
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Cancer Series Ep. 1: Access to Care, Financial Toxicity and Healthcare IT in Oncology
There were an estimated 18.1 million cancer cases around the world in 2020, according to the World Cancer Research Fund International. According to the Comparator Report on Cancer in Europe 2020, the absolute number of people diagnosed with cancer rose around 50% in Europe over the past 20 years. However, the number of deaths only increased by 20%. The numbers show we’re making great strides in survival and treatments and early screenings. But because of the aging population, cancer care and prevention are rising global public health concerns.
In the next few episodes, we’ll talk about cancer, cancer care, and technology, the role of data and IT for improved care and research, AI in the search for new therapies, but also about cancer survivorship: what happens to patients after they are cancer free, but unfortunately far from back to the life they had before cancer.
Speaker in this episode is David J. Stewart, MD, FRCPC, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Ottawa and The Ottawa Hospital. David recently wrote a book titled: A sort primer on Why Cancer Still Sucks. Find the book: https://www.amazon.com/Short-Primer-Cancer-Still-Sucks/dp/0228871999
David talked about the comparison of financial toxicity of cancer for patients in Canada and the US, and the challenges with drug development and access in the two countries; David also talked about his experience with healthcare digitalization and IT systems.
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