The Vinehealth app, designed to improve the quality of life and survival of cancer patients, announced that it is partnering with the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery to extend its highly personalised support services to brain cancer patients. By using the app, patients will be able to actively engage with their care but will also benefit from the NHNN’s existing care pathways. The solution resulting from this partnership will enable patients to benefit from improved experiences, including personalised remote support.
The provision of remote support has become crucial for the health system to continue to function despite the challenges posed to the sector by COVID-19. There is already an unmet need, as patients experience higher levels of stress and anxiety while having less face-to-face time with their healthcare teams. Particularly for brain cancer patients who, due to the nature of their disease, require complex and multi-modal care, the project is needed more than ever.
The partnership aims to address these challenges by providing patients with state-of-the-art remote digital care, which includes the provision of AI-driven educational content, but also the recording of data crucial to patient outcomes, such as symptoms, treatment side effects and medical adherence. All of these elements will contribute to a comprehensive care solution.
As Dr Rayna Patel, CEO of Vinehealth, explains, information about patients’ quality of life is crucial for the development and delivery of optimised healthcare services. The model, which is designed to provide personalised support and improve patient outcomes, allows healthcare professionals to engage with patients from their own homes “in a way that is convenient for them”, at a time when the need for remote care has been heightened by the pandemic and its accompanying restrictions. Dr Patel also expressed Vinehealth’s enthusiasm for partnering with the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery “to achieve this goal”.
Using behavioural science and AI, the app allows the patient to better monitor, manage and understand their care. With a sense of greater control, but also greater access to communication with their care teams, patients will benefit from high-quality, real-time data monitoring, which will optimise healthcare delivery and drug development, thereby improving quality of life and survival.
The offering will be made through the IDEAL framework for surgical innovation. IDEAL, set up by NHNN, aims to improve the quality of surgical research by focusing on appropriate methods, transparency of data and robust outcome reporting. Perfectly in line with the organisation’s purpose, the project will improve the management of brain cancer through informed and optimised care that will enhance patients’ quality of life.
Research in this area has suggested the effect and benefits of providing remote care involving self-management to patients. In addition to improving the quality of life of patients, these solutions also reduce the workload of cancer services, while ensuring the safety of patients and healthcare professionals. The application will also provide vital information on PROMS data to better understand patient needs and how this data can be integrated into clinical services to facilitate triage and enable more efficient outpatient care.
Dr Hani Marcus, Senior Consultant in Neurosurgery for NHNN, illustrated the benefits of the project by highlighting how devastating brain cancer is for patients and their families and how NHNN is proud to be collaborating with Vinehealth on the development of a solution specifically designed to optimise the care of brain cancer patients. He went on to explain that the shared vision is to empower patients to take control of their own health while providing healthcare professionals with valuable data to enable better decision-making on treatment options. “This is an exciting step towards improving outcomes for our patients,” he concluded.
Founded by Dr Rayna Patel and Georgina Kirby in 2018, Vinehealth is rapidly making its way into the sector primarily through its recent participation in the Health Hub. A collaboration between Wayra UK and Novartis Biome UK, co-designed with the NHS, the Health Hub enables health tech companies to accelerate the delivery of innovative solutions to key healthcare challenges.