Delays in cancer diagnosis can be fatal and preventing them really does mean the difference between the success and failure of a treatment. That’s why significant funds have been poured into researching new methods of diagnosis over the past couple of decades to try and speed up the point at which a cancer can be identified and treatment begun.
A collaboration between the cancer support charity Macmillan and medical software company BMJ Informatica has recently seen this research produce results with the development of new diagnostic software that is designed to help diagnose cancer earlier.
The software is called the electronic Cancer Decision Support Tool (eCDS) and was trialled by GPs across 15 cancer networks under a pilot scheme that, if successful, would see the software being rolled out across the country.
The software is designed to help GPs recognise the symptoms of five of the most hard to detect cancers, including pancreatic and ovarian cancer.
This year it was announced by Macmillan that the pilot had proved successful and as a result the software is now being launched nationally with the hope that it will increase cancer detection rates by collating certain patient information and calculating the risk of certain cancers based upon that information.
There has been a lot of publicity about failures in cancer care in the UK, spearheaded by the Times newspaper, which highlighted that more than half of patients who suffer from cancer in the UK were not diagnosed with the disease until it had already spread to other parts of their body.
The software is part of a government-backed campaign that is designed to try and ensure faster diagnosis for all types of cancers, even those that are notoriously difficult to detect. The software is being made available to GPs all over the UK free of charge and has been updated to include some of the feedback that was gathered through the pilot evaluation as well as a brand new symptom checker for melanoma.
The new software has been designed to work alongside the existing electronic systems that GPs use in order to make it easy to incorporate and simple to set up. It uses the symptoms that a person presents to the GP, as well as recent medical history that the patient has, as well as some demographic information that might also be useful. The software is designed to aid clinical decision making, in particular to help a GP to decide whether a referral would be the appropriate course of action or whether further investigations might be required.
More than 300,000 people are diagnosed with cancer in the UK every year and early stage treatment is in most cases far more effective and simpler than treatment at the point when the disease is more advanced.
As most GPs will only see on average around eight or nine patients with cancer each year this kind of tool is key to highlighting situations where further action might be required, to bridge the gap between the experience that the GP might have in spotting cancer and those crucial next steps.