NHS Scotland uses AI to improve emergency cardiac care

A new partnership has resulted in the delivery of a digital pathway across NHS Scotland to improve emergency cardiac care through the use of artificial intelligence.

The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, NHS Lothian and Lenus Health have joined forces to create the new digital pathway.

The solution delivers the most relevant clinical data and predictive analytics directly to emergency care teams to support cardiac care. The aim is to prevent some of the reattendances from those who received acute cardiac care within the past 30 days within NHS Scotland.

Paul McGinness, chief executive officer of Lenus Health, said: “The Lenus disease management platform is rolled out across major health boards covering 68% 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.”

The partnership uses the data science work at the University of Edinburgh, which is made possible by DataLock’s ability to securely store and link real-time healthcare data from primary and secondary care settings.

Edinburgh Napier University provides the expertise in digital co-design. Finally, the Lenus disease management platform, used across NHS Scotland, houses and operationalises the models in live point-of-care clinical workflows from within the emergency department.

The pathway is supported by Wellcome Leap, which builds programs designed to deliver health breakthroughs.

Nick Mills, British Heart Foundation Professor of cardiology at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Harnessing data and artificial intelligence to support clinical decisions has enormous potential to improve care for patients and efficiency in our busy emergency departments.”

At the end of last year we also revealed that Lenus Health had formed a partnership with med-tech start-up Us2.ai. The duo created a one-stop digital heart failure diagnosis service to deliver echo and ECG testing in community settings.