An alliance dedicated to improving the treatment and quality of life of epilepsy suffers is calling on hospitals to consider new technology investments that can improve patient treatment and reduce NHS cost pressures.
The Epilepsy Care Alliance, comprised of Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Kent, System C & Graphnet Care Alliance and Shearwater Systems, says that tech investments into epilepsy treatment could reduce pressure on the NHS by as much as £250 million a year.
Today (26 March) marks Purple Day, an international day of awareness for epilepsy, a neurological condition that leads to the tendency to have recurrent seizures.
Up to one in 100 people in the UK are believed to suffer from the condition, causing a total of 1.3 million days in hospital a year.
It’s a difficult condition to manage as existing medication only works for up to 70 per cent of sufferers.
The Epilepsy Care Alliance has been running a programme, named myCareCentric Epilepsy, exploring how technology can equip people with the ability to self-manage their condition.
Using Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, the programme provides patients with a wearable tech band, which records health data to help clinicians build a record of a patient’s condition and seizure patterns.
This has the potential to learn to classify seizures, to alert clinicians in real-time so they can consult patients remotely, as well as provide essential lifestyle recommendations and drug prescriptions.
Dr Jon Shaw, director of clinical strategy at System C & Graphnet Care Alliance: “What’s really exciting about this is that it’s a ‘first of type’ project that combines smart wearables, patient-facing applications, and enterprise communication technology, which gets messages out to the care team in real time.
“Putting data into secure Azure environments gives us huge scale and ability to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities as services and ultimately to improve patient outcomes.”
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The programme has been running since 2016 and has collected such a vast amount of data that the consortium has been able to use this to gain vital insights that could advance epilepsy treatments. For instance, they have been able to confirm relationships between lifestyle factors such as poor sleep and seizures to enable more accurate seizure prediction.
Dr Rupert Page, chief clinical information offer and consultant neurologist at Poole Hospital, said: “This approach has the potential to revolutionise the management of epilepsy by optimising the use of currently available treatments.
“The powerful insights gained from the deeper awareness of the myriad of lifestyle and other factors which affect seizure frequency may open up entirely new areas of research or treatment.”
The funding for the myCareCentric Epilepsy programme was made available by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.
Suzy Foster, director of health at Microsoft UK, said: “As hospital trusts across the UK continue to face growing pressures, it’s more important than ever to invest in the right tools that focus on the patient as a person rather than the condition, delivering the most effective care and the best outcomes for patients and their families.”
