Healthcare company Dem Dx and Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust have been awarded £1.1 million to develop and evaluate Dem Dx’s AI-powered clinical reasoning tool ‘Triage Platform’ for eye health services. The project officially launched on 4th January.
The ‘Triage Platform’ is estimated to reduce patient referrals to unnecessary tertiary care by up to 20%, potentially benefiting 350,000-540,000 patients a year, with possible operational savings of over £17 million annually.
The platform supports the practitioner during a patient’s clinical assessment. It uses a combination of a database built by doctors and AI to tell the practitioner whether a patient needs urgent attention from a doctor or a less urgent referral.
The grant is part of the Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award which plans to spend £140 million over three years to accelerate the testing and evaluation of the most promising AI technologies to meet the NHS Long Term Plan’s aims.
Dr Lorin Gresser, founder and CEO of Dem Dx, said: “We’re extremely pleased to be strengthening our existing partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital through this new funding. Effective triage is critical for patients to have accurate and safe experiences with eye hospitals. We’re the only company with an AI-based clinical decision tool aimed specifically at the frontline practitioner workforce in triage, and we are excited to see the benefits it brings to the NHS, its staff and patients.”
‘Triage Platform’ aims to maintain a high quality of clinical care to help address shortages of ophthalmology specialists, by empowering other frontline practitioners to provide clinically accurate, safe and consistent triaging at the point of first contact with the patient. This enables doctors’ time to be used more efficiently and effectively, allowing them to focus on the most critical patients.
The two-year project will trial the effectiveness of ‘Triage Platform’ in adult A&E ophthalmology services, and the data collected will be used to make the tool’s AI algorithms more accurate.
‘Triage Platform’ will also be used alongside the NHS’s video conference service ‘Attend Anywhere’, which is being used nationally as part of the COVID-19 Urgent Eyecare Service, giving patients a completely digital healthcare experience.
According to NHS digital, Ophthalmology is the NHS’s busiest outpatient service, with 7.5 million attendances each year. Yet studies have shown that accurate diagnosis of eye conditions in primary care is only achieved between 16% and 36% of the time, and up to 12% of those misdiagnosed experience adverse outcomes as a result.
Dr Alex Day, consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, said: “At Moorfields we’re constantly exploring how artificial intelligence can help us to deliver excellent patient care. This triaging tool has the potential to help our patients to be treated as quickly as possible, giving them a better outcome and experience. AI is becoming more and more important in ophthalmology and we look forward to seeing its full potential in this project.”
