Digital platform for colorectal patients

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust announce a UK-first digital platform to improve outcomes for colorectal patients.  The innovative technology supports a patient-led approach to symptom checking, which will enable clinicians to tailor treatment to individual needs and improve quality of life.

As part of its CW Innovation programme - run jointly by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and its charity, CW+ - the Colorectal Department has designed and worked together with My Clinical Outcomes (MCO) and Imperial College, and is recruiting colorectal patients to use the platform at an early stage to capture Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) data.  This will provide more insight and broaden the availability of patient data, which can then be analysed to provide a more accurate understanding of a patient’s condition and how they are responding to treatment.

The innovative platform enables patients to record their symptoms in real-time from the comfort of their homes, without having to speak to a doctor, which in turn will help the hospital track patients’ conditions remotely.  The online tool aims to capture patient data through diagnosis, treatment and long-term follow-up to improve care, whilst delivering long-term insights into the effectiveness of different treatments.

Mr Christos Kontovounisios, Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College and Colorectal Surgical Consultant at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and project lead, said: “This new digital way of collecting data actually allows the patient to become a true partner with the clinician. So far, the process of collecting information from patients has been very fragmented. With this new digital approach patients will have the opportunity to report their outcomes and their experiences and improve our ability to care for them and to help improve the service for patients in future.”

The vision is to apply the digital platform across more specialities in the Trust and move to digital transformation of PROMs and Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs), which will provide a useful tool for GP practices and digital monitoring of the Trust’s patients.

Dr Tim Williams, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of My Clinical Outcomes - a DigitalHealth.London Accelerator SME - added: “It’s been fantastic working with the team at Chelsea and Westminster.  By providing a user-friendly, web-based platform, they aim to allow patients to accurately record and track the impact of their condition on their quality of life – information that can be used by clinicians to inform and improve their treatment”.

This partnership is one of a long line of collaborations between leading UK and international organisations and the CW Innovation programme, which identifies and tests new innovations and approaches in a real-world setting with the aim of scaling and replicating high-impact initiatives across the NHS.