Guy’s Cancer Care and Research Center has begun a five-year collaboration with Careology, a healthcare platform provider. 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 innovations in digital cancer care that help build capacity, increase efficiency and improve the patient experience at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. This new technology will also be available to the NHS across the country and healthcare providers globally.
The collaboration will see the two organizations jointly develop new digital capabilities to improve support for cancer patients and enhance clinical insights, data and operational improvements for the trust.
The collaboration comes at a significant time as the cancer care backlog is facing severe pressure and more than 10,000 people with suspected cancer must 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 of dealing with cancer.
“Digital technologies have the potential to help patients and caregivers be better informed and supported, as well as provide healthcare workers with the right information that allows them to provide more responsive services and free up time for care,” said Kazmi, who also joined by the Careology Board on behalf of Guy’s and St Thomas’ to ensure that the two organizations have better collaboration and insight.
Careology’s technology allows patients to keep information about their treatment in one place, such as logging symptoms and side effects, managing their medications and recording any problems. According to Careology, this gives clinicians a real-time view of how patients are responding to treatment between appointments, allowing them to care for patients more proactively and with better insight.
“Digital technologies have the potential to help patients and carers be better informed and supported, and to provide healthcare professionals with the relevant information that enables them to provide a more responsive service”
Majid Kazmi, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
The platform it has developed is designed to help healthcare professionals manage the treatment of people living with cancer by providing remote insights and data that it says have not been available before. The collaboration will focus on improving and expanding tools that will digitize elements of the cancer pathway to improve early visibility of problems, reduce clinical administration, drive greater operational efficiency and improve patient safety.
The two said cancer care teams will be able to work more proactively and better prioritize patients reporting their symptoms and side effects. The collaboration will enable the trust to assess the impact of Careology’s technology on cancer patient groups traditionally excluded from digital technologies, such as head and neck cancer.
In addition, cancer patients will now be able to use an app at home to update their symptoms and side effects of treatments, including chemotherapy, which can be used by clinicians to see the effects a particular treatment is having on patients between appointments outside of a hospital setting.
