Guy’s Cancer collaborates with healthtech provider to digitise patient care

The cancer treatment and research centre at Guy’s has begun a five-year collaboration with Careology, a provider of healthcare platforms. Guy’s Cancer has become the first site to launch a digital cancer care platform for its patients and care teams.

Through the five-year agreement, Guy’s Cancer aims to deliver innovation in digital cancer care that helps to build capacity, drive efficiencies and improve patient experience at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. This new technology will also be available to the NHS nationwide and healthcare providers globally.

The collaboration will see the two organisations co-develop new digital capabilities to improve support for cancer patients and improve clinical insight, data and operational enhancements for the trust.

The collaboration comes at a significant time, with the cancer care backlog facing severe pressures and more than 10,000 people with suspected cancer having to wait more than 104 days to see a clinician.

Majid Kazmi, director of innovation for cancer and surgery at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, believes the technology offers clinicians and patients a better way to manage cancer.

“Digital technology has the potential to help patients and carers to be better informed and supported, as well as giving healthcare workers the relevant information that allows them to provide a more responsive service and frees up time to care,” said Kazmi, who also joined Careology’s board on behalf of Guy’s and St Thomas’ to ensure the two organisations have greater collaboration and insight.

The technology from Careology enables patients to keep information about their treatment in one place, such as logging symptoms and side effects, managing their medicines and recording any issues. According to Careology, this gives clinicians a real-time view of how patients are reacting to treatment between appointments, enabling them to care for patients more proactively and with better insight.

“Digital technology has the potential to help patients and carers to be better informed and supported, as well as giving healthcare workers the relevant information that allows them to provide a more responsive service”

The platform it has developed is designed to help healthcare professionals manage treatment for people living with cancer by providing remote insights and data, which it says has not been available before. The collaboration will focus on enhancing and extending tools that will digitise elements of the cancer pathway, with the aim of improving early visibility of issues, reducing clinical administration, driving greater operational efficiencies and improving patient safety.

The pair said cancer care teams would be able to work more proactively and better prioritise patients reporting on their symptoms and side effects. The collaboration will enable the trust to evaluate the impact of Careology’s technology on groups of cancer patients traditionally excluded from digital technology, such as head and neck cancers.

In addition, cancer patients will now be able to use an app at home to update their symptoms and side effects of treatment, including chemotherapy, which can be used by clinicians to see the effects certain treatment is having on patients in between appointments out of the hospital environment.