Helping to lead the way in modernising diagnostics and intelligent automation

Following their excellent work on stage as guest speakers at the HSJ Cancer Forum in March this year, Angela and Femi have once again been sharing their expertise with cancer peers across the country.

Angela Wong, Chief Medical Officer for North East London Cancer Alliance and Femi Odewale, Managing Director for North East London Cancer Alliance, have both taken part in recent HSJ thought-leadership events, which helps showcase the work we are doing in north east London, positions us as leaders in these areas and connects us with partners across the country who can support us in improving local cancer services.

Modernising Diagnostics

Angela partnered with Professor Mike Richards, Chair of the UK National Screening Committee and author of the Independent Review of Diagnostic Services for NHS England, at the HSJ Modernising Diagnostics Forum, which took place at the Doubletree by Hilton, Tower of London.

This event showed just how much is going on in diagnostics at the moment, where there is a lot of energy, incentive, and excitement.

Professor Mike Richards summed this up by saying: “We have made progress, there is an enthusiasm to do more, and people have highlighted the challenges such as building the work force. Where there is the will, and there is the will, we can make this happen.”

The event discussed things like

• The impact of improved uptake in screening programmes on outcomes and diagnostic demand
• Opportunities and challenges of the changing public perception of at-home and in-community diagnostics
• Exploring ways to optimise referrals including iRefer and GP Direct Access – enabling the right test, in the right place at the right time to speed up diagnosis and treatment pathways
• Discussing how value and benefits realisation are measured by NICE, commissioners and others to facilitate adoption of preventative diagnostics and screening

Intelligent Automation

Femi joined HSJ and SS&C Blue Prism’s online webinar called ‘Accelerating the Cancer Pathway through Intelligent Automation’.

This looked at the myriad of challenges in cancer care and treatment, and how Intelligent Automation (IA) is emerging as a genuine gamechanger for the cancer pathway, automating critical labour-intensive manual tasks, resulting in freeing up time for healthcare professionals to focus on human-centred patient care.

Femi talked about how we are adopting this already across north east London, for example streamlining Multi-Disciplinary Team Meetings, use of robotic automation to enhance the cancer pathway, and how all three providers in north east London are exploring the use of automation in back-office functions to help reduce the burden on administrative staff.

Femi said: “Using technology effectively will release people to focus on tasks which require much more human input and improve the quality of what we do. It will allow us to focus on more complex areas of work, which help us improve the experience for all our patients.”

He explained how we are looking at expanding this further with the use of Artificial Intelligence in chest X-Rays, which is set to reduce diagnosis time from three weeks to just three days.

The webinar took a deep dive into how intelligent automation technology can accelerate organisational value quickly and demonstrate the holistic benefits (for patients, healthcare professionals, the system, and society as a whole) which can be realised both rapidly and cost-effectively.

Looking to the future

As we progress our cancer work in north east London, we aim to take part in more events like these so we can both share our experiences with others and learn from key stakeholders and partners, so we can make the patient experience in north east London an even better one.

We have exciting programmes of work in place for the next year and beyond, and we are looking forward to sharing more details with you in the near future.

To find out more about our work, visit https://www.nelcanceralliance.nhs.uk/about/our-work