How artificial intelligence and personalised care can help improve health and wellbeing
Posted: 3rd February 2022
With increasing pressure on the NHS to provide comprehensive services, it is more important than ever for people to look after their own health and wellbeing.
A report published today from the Yorkshire & Humber Academic Health Science Network (AHSN) highlights how a personalised and tailored approach, developed by the HN company, to support patients with long-term conditions can help improve their mental and physical wellbeing reducing the need for unplanned emergency care and hospitalisation.
HN is a healthcare company that delivers artificial intelligence (AI) guided case-finding, clinical coaching, remote monitoring, and virtual ward solutions to the NHS.
The ‘Patient feedback on the benefits of artificial intelligence guided clinical coaching’ report recognises how many patients with long-term conditions and who might live with two or more chronic illnesses struggle to understand how to effectively and safely manage their conditions. A more patient centred approach can provide them with the tools they need to grow their confidence and skills, overcome health related anxieties, improve health related behaviours and self-efficacy as well as their clinical outcomes.
HN has developed a solution for patients with complex multiple needs, using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and personalised care. The AI algorithm looks at patient data and identifies those patients at risk of becoming increased users of clinical services.
Patients who take part in the service are then screened and have access to a clinical coach. Clinical Coaching is a telephone-based clinician-led service, providing sessions to empower the patient and improve care coordination with other services.
Patient feedback is vital to better understand how services like this can help improve patients’ wellbeing and health. Our role is not only to help companies like HN to connect with NHS organisations so that their innovative solutions can be adopted and spread across our region and beyond to improve patient care, but also to help further develop and improve their products. Authentic patient involvement is paramount to help and inform the design of services that can make the greatest difference.
Our Public and Patient Involvement Lead, Graham Prestwich, led on a project conducting 25 structured conversations with patients to gather their views and opinions of the service. There were three groups, those who participated in the service, those who declined to participate and a group who had not been involved at all.
Graham said: “The aim of this work was to help identify which elements of the service were considered by users and potential users to be most beneficial, and which elements they found easier or more difficult to engage with. The feedback also provides invaluable insights into ways to help further improve the service and increasing the benefits for users.”
The guided Clinical Coaching service involves a process that helps patients achieve the greatest benefit from their various treatments whilst supporting and encouraging them to work towards an improvement in the quality of their lifestyle. Importantly, the service also helps patients build their own confidence and recognition for what has been achieved and improved, a critically crucial elements of the value coaching brings to improving mental as well as physical health and wellbeing.
Dr Joachim Werr, Founder and Executive Chair of HN, said:
“Patient feedback is of paramount importance to us at HN and so this report, one of the first to investigate patients’ and public perception of AI-Guided Clinical Coaching, was of particular interest to us. It is naturally very pleasing to receive such positive feedback on the service but also patients’ ideas and recommendations for how to further develop the service encourages and inspires.We are confident our data-driven approach represents a ‘paradigm shift’ by proactively identifying patients at the highest risk of unplanned care, and inviting them to a nurse-led, supported self-care intervention. We have recently recruited a Patient Director and established a Patient Advisory Group and look forward to fully embedding the patient view into our work so it can help inform our approach going forward. A huge thanks to Graham Prestwich for playing a leading role in developing the qualitative research and this report.”
