University of Glasgow Clinical Innovation Zone: enabling multidisciplinary collaboration

Multi-disciplinary team meetings (or MDTs for short) are an increasingly important part of care management for cancer patients in particular. The purpose of the meeting is to allow the complete team of people involved in the care of a patient to review and discuss all aspects of that patient’s situation to allow them to agree the best route forward for that individual.

In most cases, this involves a team of different specialists (e.g. oncologists, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists, nurse practitioners and others) reviewing data about that patient (e.g. imaging, lab tests, patient reported outcome measures etc.) and then agreeing the treatment regime, any additional tests or the onward transfer of the patient into rehab. As the data clinicians use in this system becomes more detailed and more varied (e.g. genomics) the task of aggregating and reviewing these datasets becomes more complex and time consuming, hence the need for more decision support tools that can support the MDT and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the clinicians and carers involved in the process.

Canon Medical are increasingly interested in Clinical Decision Support and Deep Learning based pattern recognition and so we jumped at the chance to get involved in a recent workshop session
arranged by the University of Glasgow and NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde colleagues at the Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE) at the QEUH.

As well as getting a chance to present our clinical cockpit concept and get valuable feedback on it, we also got a chance to meet with both practicing clinicians and academics and so learnt a great deal
about current and emerging clinical practice in the use of MDTs and what tools will be needed in the future. We were very impressed with the calibre of the group that the team in Glasgow were able to
assemble on the day and very grateful for the chance to get involved.

I would definitely encourage other companies to work with the team at the ICE to get involved in similar events like this in the future.

Ken Sutherland President – Canon Medical, Edinburgh