iPLATO, a Huma Company, has been awarded a £1.7m research contract by Small Business Research Institute (SBRI) Healthcare, to improve the uptake of bowel cancer screening across South East London.
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The programme will address health inequalities by focusing on groups known to be less engaged with screening, forming a blueprint for potential national adoption.
The NHS distributes free Faecal Immunochemical Test (FIT) kits to people aged 60 to 74 in England who are registered with a GP practice. Age eligibility is currently being lowered to include people from 50. The kit detects small amounts of blood in poo that is not visible but may signal the presence of polyps or bowel cancer. Pre-COVID, the return rate of FIT kits was 56% in South East London against a national target of 75%. Some groups have persistently lower uptake than the rest of the population; these include non-white people, those for whom English isn’t their first language, people with a severe mental health condition, and those with learning disabilities.
Tobias Alpsten, founder and CEO of iPLATO, said: “Digital technologies hold great promise for making cancer screening and care accessible to everyone, and to reduce health inequities they must be developed in collaboration with the people they serve. This ground-breaking initiative will deliver better access to bowel cancer identification and preventative care measures for many vulnerable patients.”
SBRI Healthcare supports the development of innovations which meet known NHS challenges. Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer, costing the UK £1.74 billion annually. The programme will be delivered in partnership with the South East London Cancer Alliance (SELCA) and local community leaders, academics and primary care professionals to establish the optimal communication channels and content to engage these ‘hard-to-reach’ groups using iPLATO’s platform which will provide tailored education through mobile messaging, ensuring scalability and privacy.
Representing SELCA, Professor Arnie Purushotham, director of King’s Health Partners Cancer Centre at King's College London and consultant surgeon at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, added: “I believe this innovative collaboration with iPLATO will meaningfully benefit these four patient groups. We know that early identification of cancer has the greatest impact on cancer survival.”
