A new spinout company will advance digital transformation at NHS organisations and international healthcare providers to improve patient care, patient safety and population health and research.
The company is based on software developed by a team from UCL, King’s College London, and a coalition of NHS Foundation Trusts (King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’, South London and Maudsley, and University College London Hospitals). The NIHR UCLH and Maudsley BRCs supported the technology in its early development.
The software, known as CogStack, can search and interpret any structured or unstructured clinical data in patient records using a type of AI call natural language processing (NLP). It removes the need for some of the manual analysis and interpretation of data by NHS staff, and can provide insights which support clinical decision-making.
The spinout company, CogStack Ltd, will build on successes of the technology already seen within NHS Trusts. The founding team comprises UCL’s Professor Richard Dobson, who has been supported by both UCLH and Maudsley BRCs, with Dr Tom Searle of King's College London and Professor James Teo of King's College Hospital and Guys and St Thomas'.
Healthcare providers using CogStack have recouped 100 per cent of their investment within two years. So far, use of the technology has led to:
- Improving patient safety at UCLH by providing alerts for patients who are ‘lost-to-follow-up' in their healthcare journey, identifying hundreds of such events to be actioned in the gastroenterology clinic
- Enhanced data efficiency and savings of £1.2 m per year in 2018 for King’s College Hospital by detecting thousands of missing records of fracture clinic procedures in only 30 minutes
- Accelerated medication reviews which saved more than two hours of work per pharmacy review at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust using CogStack AI to read and summarise records
- Improving the accuracy of clinical coding for outpatient procedures and delivering £2.5 m in additional income to Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in 2023
- Fast-tracking recruitment for clinical trials for the 100k Genome project, which needed patients with suspected rare diseases for sequencing.
Professor Dobson, who is CogStack Chief Research Officer, said: “CogStack has the potential to transform healthcare by making sense of NHS data. It will help to inform clinical guidelines across the UK and globally, and we now want to share this to improve the functioning of the NHS and, most importantly, outcomes for patients.”
Dr Nick McNally, Managing Director of Research, UCLH/UCL, said: "It’s really exciting for the UCLH BRC to be involved in developing disruptive AI technology like Cogstack. At the BRC we identified 10 years ago the amazing transformative potential of Cogstack for health care and clinical research. It’s a pleasure to support the leading expertise of Richard and the team and we are delighted to be partners in this new spin out venture which will enable further development of the techology and its wider application at scale across more health and care organisations."
Prof Karl Peggs, Director of the NIHR UCLH BRC, said: “Congratulations to Richard and the whole team on the establishment of Cogstack as a new collaborative venture. This AI technology has already made a huge impact in the places it has been applied, and there is huge potential for impact in the future, in the UK and internationally. The establishment of Cogstack Ltd will fuel that further development and reach, and is a prime example of the important role that NIHR BRCs can play by investing in exciting science and supporting its commercialisation.”
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