Earlier detection of priority diseases

Early detection, accurate diagnosis and optimised treatment

Access to world class care for as many patients as possible relies on faster and more accurate diagnosis. Earlier interventions for diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, neurogenerative, cardiovascular disease or COVID-19 will deliver improved patient outcomes. Our work is supporting earlier diagnostics through a proposed national digital infrastructure for population-level studies. The improved infrastructure will provide patient stratification data and more effective disease management to increase confidence and reproducibility in diagnosis and treatment. This will be enabled by the digitisation of the NHS including digital pathology and radiology, and the use of artificial intelligence or machine learning tools where appropriate.

This work will help address healthcare challenges which include:

• increasing the uptake of new diagnostic and therapeutics
• support for greater interoperability and integration of medical and non-medical data sets
• real-time, sensitive and accurate non-invasive diagnostics
• optimised treatment delivery and verification for each patient
• improved quantitative understanding of biological systems and processes 
• rapid prediction of therapeutic effects to make clinical trials more efficient
• innovation in precision medicine, diagnostics, telemedicine and assisted living through the convergence of omics technologies, informatics and digital sensors or wearables
• supporting the use of simulations which need reliable data as the basis of their predictions