C2-Ai and Netcall announce data partnership
A technology partnership could help NHS, local government, and housing organisations collaborate to understand the needs of people in their care.
Clinical analytics specialist C2-Ai and software company Netcall have agreed to combine the companies’ capabilities to enable coordinated decisions which can help ease demand on NHS services, prevent avoidable harm and A&E visits, and target community interventions.
John Clarke, head of client solutions for healthcare at Netcall, said: “Patients are complex and are rarely viewed as one individual – they are looked at separately by acute hospitals, GPs, community care, mental health services, social care, as a local council’s citizen, or as a housing association tenant.
“But these services can and should positively impact each other, prioritising resource where it can make the biggest difference, by using the right intelligence.
“By combining up-to-date information from encounters across services and from regular communication with individuals, and then applying new data to AI already helping the NHS to find those most urgently in need, providers can harness a much more comprehensive and continuously updated risk profile.
“That’s what we hope to achieve through our new partnership – to allow region-wide services to make much better decisions in response to the various needs of a person, and to work together to enable better outcomes, reduce health inequalities, and address the recovery burden on the NHS.”
The partnership aims to allow multi-sector data to be collectively harnessed in new ways to create detailed risk profiles for individuals.
Organisations are using Netcall to continually capture wellbeing and wellness measures from individuals in the community through multiple channels, but usually this data remains confined to a single organisation.
With the agreement of the various agencies, data could be combined and applied to AI models from C2-Ai, that are being used in NHS programmes to find and act for hidden high-risk patients waiting for treatment.
For example, a person on a waiting list for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease treatment who reports worsening problems through channels such as social media, chat, portals, telephone, or targeted questionnaires, could be identified early as being at high-risk of A&E admission, harm, or complications.
Housing providers and social care teams could also be alerted to intervene to address factors in the individual’s deterioration such as unaffordable heating, or living in poor housing with mould, which could be addressed through effective social housing provision.
Dr Mark Ratnarajah, UK managing director for C2-Ai, said: “This could be a seismic opportunity to become person-centric, rather than patient-centric: to understand and enable responses to changing risks by looking at whole person, rather than just the sum of their symptoms or conditions.
“We want to enable providers across different settings to keep individuals safe and well, to keep them out of hospital, and prevent avoidable downstream costs.
“This is already intuitively a good thing to do for many working across health and care but is often not possible when a person’s information is held in lots of different places, making it challenging to understand and act on dependencies.”
