Lenus Health and Us2.ai join forces to automate the fight against heart disease
The digital health firms have partnered to improve access to echocardiograms in the UK
Digital healthcare platform Lenus Health and med tech startup Us2.ai have partnered to fight against heart disease by improving patient access to echocardiograms in the UK.
Early diagnosis and initiation of heart failure treatment reduces the risk of hospitalisation and death, but the diagnostic pathway has lengthy waiting times across the NHS.
NHS England statistics show that, at the end of September 2022, 76,291 people in England had been waiting more than six weeks for echocardiography.
Through their partnership, Lenus and Us2.ai aim to help tackle these longstanding backlogs, which have been worsened by the impact of COVID-19.
The firms have signed an agreement to operationalise US2.ai’s CE marked echocardiogram viewing and measurement tools within the Lenus platform to provide a one-stop digital heart failure diagnostic service.
The service supports a hub and spoke model where care professionals are able to deliver ECHO and ECG diagnostic testing in community settings while enabling Consultant Cardiologists to review all the clinical data collected in a single dashboard and record the diagnostic outcome without the need schedule an appointment with the patient.
Us2.ai democratises access to echo, processing complete echo reports, with zero clicks, in under two minutes
James Hare, Us2.ai co-founder and CEO
"Our partnership with Us2.ai demonstrates the utility of the Lenus platform to take innovative CE marked AI enabled devices and integrate them into a digital pathway to provide clinical decision support, speed up diagnosis for patients and address backlogs,” said Lenus CEO Paul McGinness. “Treatment can be initiated sooner and will help reduce the number of patients admitted to the emergency department, where 80% of heart failure diagnoses in the UK are made today."
A Us2.ai co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, James Hare, said: "Us2.ai democratises access to echo, processing complete echo reports, with zero clicks, in under two minutes. We're working hard to automate the fight against heart disease, and make long echo wait times, human variability, and missed diagnoses a thing of the past."
Reducing wait times
Lenus' platform is being used in the ongoing Optimised Pathway for Early Identification of Heart Failure in the Community (OPERA) study, which is examining how the introduction of innovative digital and AI techniques can improve access to heart failure diagnostic services in Scotland.
During the study, patients suspected of diagnostic heart failure attend a single clinic appointment to undergo a bank of tests including electrocardiogram (ECG) heart tracing, echo ultrasound heart scan and blood-based biomarkers.
Full results of the collaboration between Lenus, AstraZeneca UK, NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, University of Glasgow and West of Scotland Innovation teams are expected in early 2023.
However, results of a pilot at NHS Louisa Jordan, in the first quarter of 2021, found the wait time for heart failure diagnostic tests was reduced from more than 12 months to just six weeks using the Lenus Heart Failure Diagnostic service.
Lenus Health is well placed to operationalise leading AI tools and create a paradigm shift in care
Paul McGinness, Lenus Health co-founder and CEO
"In the OPERA project, we saw how the echo AI-assisted report developed by Us2.ai could be used to further improve heart failure diagnostic efficiency. There is tremendous opportunity to bring advances like Us2.ai that use AI to improve access to care and reduce waiting times for tests which can now be done safely in the community rather than specialist settings," continued McGinness. "By delivering tech-enabled diagnosis and management of long-term conditions like heart failure and COPD, Lenus Health is well placed to operationalise leading AI tools and create a paradigm shift in care that takes it out of acute settings and puts healthier patients back in their communities.”
McGinness will be speaking at the AstraZeneca booth at the SLUSH 2022 startup event in Helsinki on 17 and 18 November 2022. For more information see here.
Notes for the editor
For more information, please contact Dillan Yogendra (dillan@silver-buck.com) on behalf of Lenus Health
About Lenus Health
Lenus Health helps unlock the existing health data silos to facilitate more efficient and effective care pathways, with a focus on the most challenging long-term conditions. Our interoperable platform underpins digital services to enable more streamlined clinical workflows and allows providers to do more with their existing IT infrastructure, enhanced by wearable and device integrations. The platform is proven to act as a test bed for innovation used to operationalise AI tools and generate unique structured datasets. Transforming the end-to-end pathway for chronic disease creates a more sustainable system with patients at the centre of their care journey. Learn more by visiting www.lenushealth.com and following @lenushealth on Twitter.
About Us2.ai
Singapore-based med tech startup Us2.ai is the developer of FDA- cleared AI software that fully automates a complete echo report. The company’s software tools improve clinical decision making and cardiovascular research for clinical trials using echocardiography, the safest and most common cardiac imaging modality. Us2.ai connects institutions and imaging labs around the world on a platform of ready to use automation tools for view classification, segmentation and federated learning across diverse, anonymous patient and disease cohorts.