The Cancer Innovation Challenge was a £1M project funded by the Scottish Funding Council to help Scotland become a world-leading carer for people with cancer. Innovation Centres The Data Lab, Digital Health and Care Institute and Precision Medicine Scotland worked in partnership to help the NHS in Scotland use data to refine diagnosis, select treatments and improve the experience for patients.
The Challenge
The collaboration was set up to tackle one of the most important health challenges of our time: caring for people with cancer.
1 in 2 people born after 1960 in the UK will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime. When a person is diagnosed with cancer in the NHS, a trail of data is created, from diagnosis to treatment to recovery, providing a potentially rich and currently under-used information resource.
Outcomes for cancer patients in Scotland fall behind those of our Northern European counterparts. However, Scotland has some of the best health service data in the world, providing the opportunity for innovation, research and development in cancer care.
Harnessing the power of data can unlock huge value for patients, healthcare professionals and the wider NHS.
The Solution
The Cancer Innovation Challenge (CIC) was launched to fund the development of innovative approaches to using NHS data to improve the patient journey and to capture and use patient’s own views on their experiences and outcomes.
By having more detailed and timely information on cancer treatments and on how services perform, Scotland will be able to plan services more appropriately, identify and reduce any variations in treatment across Scotland, continuously improve services and outcomes for patients, and ensure patient-centred care.
The Outcomes
CIC provided insights into how ground-breaking research and innovation with data can improve the experience of cancer patients. Three organisations were funded to develop and evaluate their solutions to help the NHS in Scotland use data to improve a patient’s cancer journey: Px Healthcare, My Clinical Outcomes and Canon Medical Research Europe.
New products were developed and implemented helping to improve the cancer journey for many patients, including PROEMS – a solution for collecting patient-reported outcomes and experiences across an entire organisation, such as an NHS board.
CIC also delivered a world first in Canon Medical Research Europe’s deep learning-powered automated RECIST assessment for Mesothelioma.
Listen to our podcast series on the Cancer Innovation Challenge to find out more about what it is, who’s involved and the results from it: