Evidence Generation Case Study: Concentric Health

Concentric is a secure digital consent and shared decision-making web application which transforms the paper process of giving consent for treatment.

Using a smart phone or computer, patients can access personalised, treatment-specific evidence-based information which supports consent conversations and enables informed, shared decisions. They can view consent forms and give consent remotely or in-person with their clinician prior to the procedure.

Benefits:

• Improve operational efficiency by reducing physical outpatient consultations, cancellations and delays, and the use of paper within the consent process
• Improve patient safety by reducing errors and ensuring appropriate documentation
• Reduce inappropriate clinical variation with trusted SNOMED-CT coded clinical content supporting decision-making across over 1000 treatments
• Support patient understanding, providing accessible, tailored information
• Electronic Health Record integration for demographics, documents and authentication
• Administration interface to manage users, review usage and feedback
• Audit trail of all user actions

Upon joining the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme, Concentric had already developed a mature digital consent platform available for use by NHS trusts. Their consent solution had been mobilised in several healthcare organisations, including Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

Start of the journey

Concentric started the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme with a Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) from academic backgrounds (CEO – 16 publications, CMO – 50 publications), so their team had a strong understanding of the research landscape and academic networks. Evidence generation was always a priority, however Concentric’s team were less familiar with the NICE Evidence Standards Framework and research requirements for NHS digital health solutions based on their NICE evidence tier.

Support from the Accelerator and the Generator

Through the Generator workshops and support from their NHS Navigator, work was undertaken to identify Concentric’s tier on the NICE Evidence Standards Framework, and to establish the research requirements to demonstrate efficacy and return on investment. Their NHS Navigator supported Concentric to perform a gap analysis on their current evidence using the NICE Framework (published on Concentric’s website), establish an evidence generation strategy and identify future academic priorities. Initially, Concentric’s CMO had planned to perform a randomised control trial but through the Generator workshops and Navigator sessions it transpired that Concentric were on Tier 2, and so such an extensive study may not be necessary to demonstrate efficacy to buyers.

Progress

The Evidence Generator workshops led to brokering a discussion with Peter Lovell from the National Institute for Health Research RDS to support future work in a qualitative evaluation of Concentric’s platform.

Concentric aimed to undertake a Health Economics (HE) analysis and through the Generator programme  they pitched a HE proposal on the economic burden of paper-based consent to MSc students in 2020, but they were unsuccessful in finding a suitable student to take on the research study. Their NHS Navigator later met with the Professor of Surgery at Kings College London, who introduced Concentric’s CMO to an Honorary Clinical Research Fellow to discuss an academic collaboration for their HE analysis, which will now be conducted by a MSc student at Kings College London in Autumn 2021.

In addition, the Generator workshops supported Concentric in considering how to evidence the benefits of product features aimed at tackling health inequalities, such as language translation and the ability to change font size.

Concentric Health is currently one of 20 digital health companies on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme.

The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator is a collaborative programme funded by London’s three Academic Health Science Networks – UCL Partners, Imperial College Health Partners, and the Health Innovation Network, MedCity, CW+ and receives match funding from the European Regional Development Fund.