The university spinout can search and interpret any structured or unstructured clinical data to improve patient safety.
CogStack, a spinout company from UCL, King’s College London, and a coalition of NHS Foundation Trusts, plans to advance digital transformation at NHS organisations and international healthcare providers to improve patient care, patient safety, population health and research.
The software can search and interpret any structured or unstructured clinical data in patient records using a type of AI called natural language processing. 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.
“CogStack has the potential to transform healthcare by making sense of NHS data,” said CogStack chief research officer Richard Dobson.
“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,” he added.
Recoup investment
The company claims that healthcare providers who have used CogStack have recouped 100% 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. It has also enhanced data efficiency and savings of £1.2 million per year in 2018 for King’s College Hospital by detecting thousands of missing records of fracture clinic procedures in only 30 minutes, and 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.
Elsewhere, the software has improved the accuracy of clinical coding for outpatient procedures and has delivered £2.5 million in additional income to Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in 2023, and it has fast-tracked recruitment for clinical trials for the 100k Genome project, which needed patients with suspected rare diseases for sequencing.
The software was 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.
