2024 Look Ahead: Spotlight on Diagnostics
At a speech I gave recently to the private health insurance industry on developments in HealthTech, I was asked which diagnostics had made the biggest difference to health outcomes. A tricky question.
In case you wondered, my answer was early diagnosis. This is the vision ABHI Diagnostics pursues - to make high quality diagnostic technologies accessible to all who need them when they are needed, so that diseases can be detected and treated earlier.
If diagnosed at the earliest stage, almost all women with breast cancer and more than 9 in 10 people with bowel cancer survive their disease for five years or more. This falls to around 3 in 10 women when breast cancer is diagnosed at the most advanced stage and drops to just 1 in 10 people for those with bowel cancer.
Quick, accurate, convenient tests to identify the pathogen of an infection, and its antibiotic susceptibility, means appropriate antimicrobial therapy can be administered as early as possible and so reduce an individual’s risk of sepsis and septic shock, as well as supporting antimicrobial stewardship.
The advent of new therapies for Alzheimer’s disease marks a turning point in managing progression of the disease. Early and accurate diagnosis – aided by the discovery of new novel biomarkers and advances in brain imaging technology - will be key to identifying those who will benefit most from these treatments.
These scenarios highlight the value of diagnostic information in decision-making along every step of a person's health, wellness and disease journey. Yet diagnostics remains under invested in, with the NHS not set up to realise this value across all pathways. Ensuring that diagnostics is central to early disease detection is a key objective of ABHI Diagnostics. Our activity in 2024 builds on last year’s work to raise access to diagnostic technologies in critical pathways. We engaged with the NHS cancer programme, supporting its goal to improve early detection rates for all types of cancer, with members benefiting from the innovation calls ABHI supported through this relatively well-resourced initiative.
That engagement will continue in 2024 and will be boosted with the knowledge and expertise we will build through a new objective to expand genomic, and other precise diagnostic, testing to inform personalised treatment strategies. A roundtable we hosted with stakeholders validated our hypothesis: the systematic utilisation of diagnostic information - from, amongst others, genetic tests, novel biomarker assays, and broader elements of patient health data, to advances in medical imaging - is critical to inform tailored treatment strategies and clinical decisions. Our aim is to widen access to these tests so that they are standard across more clinical pathways. This objective is aligned across much of the life sciences sector, and 2024 will see ABHI Diagnostics engage in biomarker discovery, development of companion diagnostics and their adoption and spread.
As Andrew mentions in his 2024 outlook, the world of AI exploded into consciousness and commercial reality in 2023. Companies I have spoken with, members and non-members alike, support our objective to develop value and access routes for clinical deployment of AI-based imaging and digital diagnostics, the two most compelling cases for the application of AI tools in diagnosis. Our work with the AI Lab, the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR), and other stakeholders, is geared to integrating, and therefore normalising, the wide and varied technologies which are being tested and piloted across the NHS. This is an exciting new addition to our work and will be in conjunction with ABHI Digital.
Last year saw several new businesses take up membership and join ABHI Diagnostics. ABHI’s ambition is to grow our diagnostics community and new members have brought leadership and heft to our work on core diagnostics and the crucial work conducted by laboratories, community diagnostic centres and networks to reduce record diagnostics wait lists.
Led by NHS England and the Office for Life Sciences, the Diagnostics Industry Advisory Group (DIAG) serves as an important forum for engaging with the diagnostics industry to advance the Diagnostics Transformation Programme. Following a strategic re-focus last summer, the DIAG is working to enhance industry partnerships to achieve the goal of ensuring 95% of patients receiving a diagnostic test within 6 weeks. It is widely accepted that diagnostics can not only drive-up outcomes but also productivity in healthcare. As NHS England evaluates the programme's impact, we are now at a point where a more streamlined DIAG can help with our objective to lead the industry in developing and implementing strategies to boost diagnostic capabilities. 2024 will also see us do more work with local NHS organisations, in particular Trusts in the Shelford Group, to offer further opportunities for industry to collaborate and co-develop solutions to address unmet need.
Without doubt, clinical decision making will be based on multiple sources of diagnostic information. I believe the multi-modality approach we take with ABHI Diagnostics, connections with the ecosystem, relevant objectives and active, engaged members, position us well for success in 2024 and beyond.
