A West of Scotland team developing a digital service to support people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) says the award of funding from a UK programme promoting artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare will allow them to expand their work to the rest of the UK and worldwide.

The Dynamic Scot digital platform brings together a mix of apps, portals and artificial intelligence to support patients and clinicians to manage their COPD care, and begin to develop systems that will allow early warning ahead of someone’s health deteriorating.

Last month healthandcare.scot reported that the service was extending from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to NHS Lothian. Currently some 2,000 people with COPD are using the platform as part of its development.

Now Dynamic Scot is one of a number of organisations to receive funding from the AI Award, £140mpot set up by the UK government, NHS England’s NHSX, the Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC) and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The fund supports promising AI-driven technologies in health and social care through the regulatory process by allowing them to invest in building evidence that demonstrates their safety and effectiveness.

Dynamic Scot is a collaboration between NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde and the West of Scotland Innovation Hub, which it hosts; the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre; and Storm ID who developed the Lenus Health Platform which is at the heart of the service.

Dr Chris Carlin, Clinical Lead of Dynamic Scot and a Consultant Respiratory Physician at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, says the funding award will allow them to build on their work:

“COPD is a global healthcare challenge and managing it has become even more challenging with the covid-19 pandemic. The COPD digital service we’ve developed has helped reduce that pandemic impact, with a positive impact on patient care and outcomes.

“This award will allow us to bring the exciting innovations – AI insights - that we’ve developed in the research environment through into clinical practice. The evaluations that this award will allow us to undertake will let us gather the evidence about how best to use these AI insights to support people with COPD and their clinical teams to co-manage their condition.”

Consultant in Emergency Medicine Dr David Lowe, who is Co-Clinical Lead of Dynamic Scot and the West of Scotland Innovation Lead at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, says the hope now is to make the case for taking the approach beyond Scotland - and beyond COPD.

“The award allows the Dynamic Scot team to continue to transform COPD care in Scotland and share the digital service with the rest of the UK and worldwide.

“AI-embedded clinical decision support delivered to COPD patients will, we hope to demonstrate, enhance care for this group of patients but also provide a template for future work in other clinical areas such as heart failure and the challenges of an ageing population.

Paul McGinness, from Storm ID, said: “The Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award recognises the world class data science work undertaken to date by the project team. We look forward to working with the NHS to operationalise the use of AI driven personalised risk prediction scores within clinical practice, to ultimately help patients with COPD.”

Other innovation stories: NHS to use data to predict illness; Chief Scientist to chair Scottish innovation summit;  Insight: harnessing the pandemic innovation surge;

Sign up to our bulletin for key health & social care updates straight to your inbox.