Disease management: biomarkers to digital health
Sylke Grootoonk and Derek Hill, IXICO, talks about how to effectively manage chronic diseases, biomarkers and digital health
With rising costs healthcare stakeholders are moving away from a “pay per intervention” to a “pay for outcomes” model and from a “diagnose and treat” to a “predict and pre-empt” approach.
This trajectory is key to managing chronic diseases more effectively and is driving the need to identify combination biomarkers that can predict disease progression and fluctuations in disease state as well as likely treatment response to drugs that are available on the market.
Crucial to bringing these advances into clinical practice are digital healthcare tools that are well validated and can be implemented cost-effectively.
By applying automated and quantitative assessments of disease state and progression in clinical practice, healthcare professionals can now access advanced technologies that have already been proven to work in global clinical trial settings where they provide an efficient means for patient inclusion.
This additional information provides clinical “decision support”, adding confidence to clinical decision making process and results in a more rapid and accurate diagnosis, leading to more timely and appropriate treatment and potentially improved patient outcomes. These decision support tools are increasingly “digital”.
IXICO’s Assessa platform is an example of a digital clinical decision support technology that automatically analyses imaging data across different specialist centres, scanning devices and protocols, and specifically takes into account the degenerative changes observed in strongly diseased brains for implementation in clinical practice.
Such methods can provide enhanced performance when the imaging data is combined computationally with other information about the patient such as demographics and cognitive tests.
IXICO is committed to providing enabling Digital Healthcare tools for both research and clinical settings for a range of conditions, including debilitating neurological diseases such as dementia and multiple sclerosis.
As part of the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia Initiative (EPAD) – a collaboration between academic and private sectors to test innovative treatments for the secondary prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia, Assessa is being used to stratify subjects and identify patients who are most likely to benefit from experimental treatment.
There is a growing interest from clinicians in the NHS and overseas who perceive value in using digital technologies in combination with traditional diagnostic and monitoring tools for dementia in routine clinical practice.
NHS providers are employing digital technologies to improve efficiency and capacity for clinical experts while the private sector views such tools as valuable differentiators in their markets.
Under a new strategic collaboration with a major pharmaceutical company leading clinical experts are using IXICO’s technology to remotely diagnose and monitor multiple sclerosis patients at risk of a potentially deadly treatment side effect.
The facilitation of a rapid and expert second opinion will help treating physicians to improve outcomes in their patients.
Through close collaboration with pharma and academic partners in this way IXICO is developing digital healthcare solutions in new clinical areas.
By providing interfaces that can be used by physicians and patients, as well as their friends and family, digital technology can enable real-world, real-time collection of clinical and patient reported data as well as data passively collected from devices.
This enables the targeting of medication and just-in-time interventions that improve patient outcomes by preventing relapse episodes or escalating needs.
Ensuring patients are on the right treatment plan as soon as possible, with a treatment regime that they respond to, delivers positive patient outcomes whilst reducing the burden of cost on healthcare systems.