A new partnership between NHS Lothian, the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University and Lenus Health is aiming to improve emergency care for cardiac patients in Scotland by using artificial intelligence.

Together with university collaborators, NHS Lothian and digital platform Lenus Health say they want to deliver a “transformational” digital health pathway that will deploy artificial intelligence to support cardiac care in emergency departments.

The work aims to streamline evaluation and accurate diagnoses of cardiac patients in A&E by feeding in the relevant clinical data gathered by their medical team so that predictive analytics can be used to inform how best to manage the patient’s condition.

The work is supported by Wellcome Leap and the partnership agreement draws on the data science research at the University of Edinburgh and its existing partnership with NHS Lothian on DataLoch on health data management.

DataLoch securely stores and links real-time anonymised healthcare data from primary and secondary care settings providing enough information for artificial intelligence systems to examine all the different factors to predict the treatments likely to deliver the best outcomes.

Edinburgh Napier University and has been involved in the digital co-design and its Professor of Cardiovascular Health, Lis Neubeck says patients and clinical teams will play a big part in how the final system works:

“Involving staff and patients in healthcare transformation is a critical element in ensuring that a solution is feasible and acceptable, and ensures that we co-create a solution that actually works in clinical practice.”

Lenus Health’s disease management platform, used widely across NHS Scotland can hold and create operational models using information from clinical workflows live at the point-of-care within the emergency departments.

In 2022, Lenus Health signed an agreement with NHS Scotland and university partners to work together to help patients with chronic conditions – like heart disease – and drive more clinical research.

While acute cardiac disease is a leading cause of death worldwide, rapid and accurate diagnosis can be challenging as symptoms of chest pain and breathlessness also overlap with other conditions.

Nick Mills, British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology at the University of Edinburgh, explained:

“For patients with acute chest pain or breathlessness due to a heart attack or heart failure, early diagnosis and treatment saves lives. Unfortunately, many conditions cause these common symptoms, and the diagnosis is not always straight forward. Harnessing data and artificial intelligence to support clinical decisions has enormous potential to improve care for patients and efficiency in our busy Emergency Departments.”

Each year, heart and circulatory diseases cost NHS Scotland around £800m and around 20% of patients receiving acute cardiac care return to the emergency department within 30 days of their initial attendance. By adopting AI to support accurate diagnosis at the outset, the team is aiming to prevent at least 1 in 5 of these return visits.

Alasdair Gray, Consultant and Honorary Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh said:

“Chest pain is one of the most common problems presenting to Scottish Emergency Departments. This work, being developed in collaboration with patients and NHS staff, has the potential to improve substantially the care for chest pain patients not just in the Emergency Department but also in the months following hospital discharge.”

The Chief Executive Officer of Lenus Health, Paul McGinness, says its disease management platform, already covers 68% of the Scottish population and is “uniquely able to develop and deploy both in-house and third-party AI models.”

In 2022, University of Strathclyde researchers uncovered the communication system used by cells lining our blood vessels which may be faltering in cardiovascular disease and Consultant Cardiologist, Dr David Northridge said at the time that the “lack of consistent data on cardiac care” huge concern across Scotland.

Mr McGinness said this new collaboration with the Edinburgh universities and NHS Lothian builds on the aims of Lenus Health:

“Supporting frontline NHS staff and cardiac patients by delivering data and AI insights in the Emergency Department builds on the company’s ambition to reduce the acute care demands associated with long-term conditions that are currently overwhelming health systems through earlier and more efficient diagnoses of imprecise symptoms such as chest pain and breathlessness.”

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