Deontics announced as a finalist at the Patient Safety Awards 2016


June 8, 2016


Clinically-led artificial intelligence (AI) company Deontics has been announced as a finalist at the Patient Safety Awards 2016 in the ‘Best Emerging Technology and IT’ category.

Deontics impressed judges with its pioneering AI technology which acts as a clinical ‘sat nav’ for personalised care by integrating clinical evidence-based practice at national and local level with individual patient information directly into the patient pathway in a visually effective user interface.

Its state-of- the-art computer modelling language system provides clinicians with suggestions to support and justify clinical decisions at the point-of- care, and helps to better coordinate care delivery through alerts, reminders, clinical pathways and workflow management.

The awards, now in their 8 th year, drew praise from judges on the high quality of entries. The second round of judging will take place next week, and will see experts from the Deontics team present to a panel of senior and influential figures from the health sector. The winner will be announced on 5th July 2016 at an awards ceremony, to be held in Manchester Central alongside the Patient Safety Congress.

There were over 650 submissions, of which 170 made it to the final cut, which means that there is fierce competition for these coveted awards. They are run by HSJ and Nursing Times, whose respective editors Alastair McLellan, and Jenni Middleton, said: “The projects submitted demonstrate those who are constantly innovating and overcoming challenges to put patients’ needs first.”

The announcement as an awards finalist represents another milestone in the company’s rise since in span out of the University of Oxford, University College London and Cancer Research UK just two years ago. Deontics is already delivering new pathways for large NHS trusts, has built a lung cancer system for a global pharmaceutical company, and is in commercial discussions with several leading IT companies.

Feedback from clinicians, patients and providers has highlighted the role Deontics plays in supporting safer care. The technology helps to avoid decision-making errors and ensure performance standardisation across medicine – a key recommendation in the UK’s National Information Board (NIB) framework, Personalised Health and Care 2020 (PHaC 2020). The report references the need to “drive down variations in quality and safety of care, patients’ changing needs will go unmet, people will be harmed who should have been cured, and unacceptable variations in outcomes will persist”.

Dr. Guy Wood-Gush, CEO of Deontics said: “Unwarranted variability in clinical practice is a well- known phenomenon which can lead to unnecessary deaths and patient morbidity. Being named a finalist at the Patient Safety Awards is another step in our mission to help make personalised health and care a reality.

“The NHS is going through a period of reform and there is now increasing recognition that reducing variation through consistent and configurable local pathways is a way to improve patient experience, reduce waiting times and reduce costs by preventing avoidable readmissions reducing lengths of stay and preventing error”, continued Dr. Wood-Gush.

For more information on the awards, visit: https://www.patientsafetycongress.co.uk/2016-shortlist

For more information on Deontics, visit: www.deontics.com

About Deontics

Deontics provides personalised clinical decision support software that is the result of long-term academic research in medical artificial intelligence originating at Carnegie Mellon University, and subsequently developed at the Medical Research Council, University of Oxford, University College London and Cancer Research UK.

Deontics was founded to incorporate concepts rooted in cognitive science, artificial intelligence and medical informatics into day-to- day clinical decision making in order to improve the quality of medical care in the UK and throughout the world.

Deontics provides clinically-led artificial intelligence for healthcare providers that delivers personalised clinical decision support for quality patient outcomes. A clinical ‘sat nav’ for personalised care, it integrates clinical good practice at national and local level with individual patient information directly into the patient pathway in a visually effective user interface. Use of Deontics systems throughout a network of hospitals and primary care clinicians can greatly enhance the quality of integrated care as well as the quality of individual specific clinical decisions.