Ahead of the Health Tech Awards 2021 ceremony, HTN caught up with Vijay Magon, Managing Director at CCube Solutions – the headline sponsor for the awards programme – to talk data standards, patient facing tools and how to extract value from unstructured information…
We began our chat by asking Vijay what has been happening at CCube Solutions over the past few months…
“After six months of hard work, we’re delighted to have been awarded full certification for four ISO standards: Quality Management Systems; Environmental Management; Information Security Management; and Project Management Information. In addition, we achieved a formal Clinical Risk & Safety assessment for DCB0129.
“Having worked in the NHS for over 20 years, with many UK customers, we wanted to assure them that we are doing things right; that’s the way we work and the way our systems operate. This is a huge achievement for an independent UK SME delivering solutions in the NHS and we are very proud!”
On system related developments, Vijay also shared with us their work in developing patient facing tools: “We have also been working hard on patient facing solutions and have been working closely with North Bristol NHS Trust.
“The goal is to get patients involved with their care, and to engage the patient with the clinical teams. The solution allows a patient to self-manage their care by accessing their (selected) records online and by adding information about their health and care and with Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU).”
Vijay also explained the use cases: “For example, in preparation for scheduled appointments, relevant information can be shared such as weight or blood pressure – and other relevant information about overall healthcare, such as new medications or emergency contacts, family dependencies, etc. This will enable health service providers to request pertinent information and data via simple online forms completed by patients, and it will enable patients and service providers to provide this information when it’s convenient to them.
“A hospital can [also] make documents available for patients through the portal. A lot of clinical notes were not written to be read outside the hospital, however, recent referrals, and discharge summaries, can be made available.
“The programme is currently in phase one, and we’re preparing for trials later this year.”
What progress have you made in adopting new technologies into your systems?
“We have a couple of examples. The first [is that] we have been supporting our customers to move from an on-premises solution to the cloud. Our most recent is with a trust that has been using our system for 12 years and is now moving to our latest system hosted in the cloud, through UKCloud. This is set to go-live soon.
“The second area focuses on gleaning value from unstructured content. Our systems hold huge volumes of unstructured content – a lot of text and handwriting. The opportunity is to use tools to extract that information, and looking for defined forms, to then glean additional value from [that].
“This information could be buried somewhere in the record, which could be 300 pages. By using machine learning tools, we can look at the text and, if the text contains a term, for example ‘patient’ and ‘consent’, then it finds it; our systems flag it as page number 56, and then automatically creates an index. Using technology to discover and extract usable information from unstructured data is helping to realise tangible benefits for practioners – potential life-saving opportunities are a real blessing!
“The exciting and most powerful part is that when the text is extracted, we can then offer it to the user to do searches, as you would using a search engine. We know clinicians remember patients by the treatment provided, sometimes by the drug prescribed, so this makes it easier for them. But where it really takes off is by bringing that relevant information to a user, [and] working to extract more contextual information. For example, a cardiologist may want a different view to the maternity department, so I want the system to recognise the user and present the relevant information to them on the screen.”
In other recent news reported by HTN, CCube virtually attended the HTN Digital Primary Care Conference 2021 to share its solution for digitising Lloyd George records and also celebrated the milestone of capturing, managing, and delivering 50 billion images of NHS paper documents.
