AI is revolutionising healthcare data quality by streamlining clinical coding, improving patient safety, bolstering research and enhancing surgical outcomes.
Cogstack, a spinout collaboration between King’s College London, UCL, and a coalition of NHS Foundation Trusts (including King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’, South London and Maudsley, and University College London Hospitals) aims to drive the digital transformation of NHS organisations and international healthcare providers through better data quality and interoperability.
The platform leverages advanced AI to extract deep, contextual insights from patient records to support clinical decision-making and research.
It utilises natural language processing (NLP) to search both structured and unstructured clinical data and automatically assigns diagnostic and treatment codes based on text.
Its models, trained on millions of real-world clinical texts and refined with hundreds of thousands of clinician-supplied labels, enable precise data analysis.
Through its deployment across partner NHS Trusts, Cogstack has brought significant improvements in physical and mental healthcare.
This includes enhanced workforce productivity and automated data tasks, such as coding, audits and disease registries.
The technology’s reach extends beyond the UK, with hospitals in Asia, Australia, and Europe adopting and evaluating Cogstack solutions. Healthcare providers reported recouping their investment within two years.
One notable success includes King’s College Hospital, which saved £1.2 million annually by quickly identifying thousands of missing fracture clinic records.
At University College London Hospitals, Cogstack enhanced patient safety by flagging ‘lost to follow-up’ cases, leading to timely interventions. Additionally, it improved outpatient coding accuracy and generated an additional £2.5 million in revenue for Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in 2023.
Professor James Teo, CogStack Chief Medical Officer and Professor of Neurology at King’s College Hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trusts, said: ‘As a trusted, home-grown innovation from the NHS, CogStack is easy to deploy and empowers healthcare providers with medically-intelligent analytics at low cost. We are proud to demonstrate how our technology can benefit population health in the UK and internationally. We aim to expand Cogstack’s capabilities to deliver our solutions to more NHS trusts and new markets with future investments.’
To ensure data security, CogStack technologies are deployed within hospital IT networks or secure data environments, ensuring all patient data remains within the digital ‘walls’ of hospitals.
CogStack AI models contain only representations of coded clinical information, so they will never release confidential information and have been in use in major NHS programmes for many years.
