Recent investment in digital capacities and community diagnostic centres (CDCs) in the NHS, has been welcomed by Managing Director of UK & Ireland at Philips, Mark Leftwich.
The Philips employee of 21 years took up his new role in 2022, taking over from predecessor Neil Mesher.
A “clear vision” for a single patient record
In this new role, Leftwich knows that the budget is a critical piece of the puzzle towards digitisation to improve the NHS service, which has been underinvested in for the last decade. “We are at the foothills of digital,” he says. “The fact you still walk into a hospital and it's paper based is just unbelievable in this day and age.”
The MD makes the point that asking the same patient to recall their patient history 15 times in one patient journey cannot be the model going forward.
For Leftwich, the answer is not a hospital by hospital digitisation approach, it is to work at the integrated care board (ICB) level. “If you think about there's only 50 customers then to deal with, and 50 regions to digitise, then it becomes far more manageable,” he explains.
Once you do this, Leftwich says that the next critically important step is to link up primary and secondary care, and think of the entire patient journey. “I think it's quite easy to connect up a hospital data system and have diagnostic images transferred across the region. You can do that. The challenge is that you need to connect up GPs, primary care, community, nursing, mental health services, hospitals, and care homes.
The difference now, compared to previous digitisation pushes in the NHS is the NHS App. Which Leftwich sees now as “clear vision” for a single patient record. With this clearer vision, all ICBs in the organisation have something tangible to work toward. The greatest hurdle with this will be the standardisation of the data, Leftwich predicts from experience . “There is no such thing as an easy migration of data,” he says. Again he emphasises that the budget will be important in making this a reality.
Data connectivity for scanners
One exciting project that is happening at Philips is one with Imperial in London. The project involves connecting up all of its scanners, brand agnostic. This forms what Leftwich calls the “Radiology Operations Command Centre”. This is a hub with screens that leads out into the “spokes” which is each of the scanners.
All of the spokes can dial in and ask for help from the hub, that can see the scans. Enabling junior radiographers to be in the room with the patient, with one more senior and experienced radiographer in the “Command Centre”. Leftwich explains that this has doubled the speed of training new members of staff. But it is the future applications of this technology that gets Leftwich truly excited. “When you start to think about the opportunities, it’s places where we've got real health inequalities, with people living in coastal and rural areas, where it's hard to find staff.”
Leftwich explains that the vision is for them to connect up all the scanners in the country into a real network. This way, you could have people at specialist hospitals, like St Thomas’ in London, dealing in and helping a rural centre from afar.
He calls this concept “networking diagnostics”.
Diagnostics in the community: CDCs and virtual wards
In the mission to reduce diagnostic waiting lists, Leftwich thinks it is less about about asking people to go for scans in screening programs, and more about putting those scanners in the community, where the uptake will be better as access is easier. As such, the push to build Community Diagnostics Centres or CDCs, has been huge in recent years.
This is a necessary step in addressing the huge backlogs, but thinking long term, once this is under control, prevention is going to be key. Leftwich is excited for the launch of Philips’ case report on a University of Sussex Hospital case study on its virtual wards. The study illustrates the concept of wearable technology in patient’s daily lives for GPs to monitor. The wearable technology in question in a heart monitoring patch. The patch can be worn up to 10 days, and is far less intrusive on the patient’s daily activities, than previous iterations, which Leftwich compares to a walkman. The cumbersome nature of which impacts patient activity and therefore the skew the results.
Following the monitoring, results can then be analysed by doctors in patient monitoring hubs, and patients who require no further action are kept entirely out of the hospital.
The new report covers 150 patients, and really shows the scalable nature of the technology. The point of this technology is that many people are brought into the hospital that do not need to be there. Leftwich says there are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK and Ireland that get cardiac tests every year with old fashioned technology. Meaning, the impact of this technology could be a huge help to the NHS.
“Connecting the data…virtual wards…this is where we are going,” says Leftwich.
AI in diagnostics
Though there is huge buzz about AI in healthcare digitisation, Leftwich emphasis that data connectivity should be the main focus. However, though AI is not the be all and end all, he does note that it can make all the rest work more effectively. AI has been used in various forms in healthcare for a while now, it is just that in recent years, the application types have been increasing.
For instance, Philips now uses AI to do the scheduling for its MRI scans. The AI system gets the patient list and can sort them into say, knees and shoulders, and then create knee days and shoulder days.
On a more medical note, Philips is now integrating AI into the scanners themselves. These scanners are quicker, three times as quick in fact. Leftwich points out that the impact on NHS waiting lists of getting scans down from an hour to 15-20 mins is “incredible”. It also reduces the energy impact, so makes them cheaper to run.
For the patient journey in diagnostics, AI is now being used to do a “first read” of scan images, even sequencing a report categorising the scans into; ones with nothing detected, ones worth a deeper look, and ones that are definitely a problem. Essentially, a red, amber, green triage system in operation, giving a prioritisation list. From this point, it can forward the scans onto the most appropriate radiologist to read the report. As of now, certain AI systems can even look at a tumour and recommend plans and expected outcomes based on other tumours it has recorded.
And the system algorithms are only getting more advanced. Given these applications, Leftwich is keen to integrate AI into the entire workflow as a tool to increase efficiency and prioritise workforce.
The future
Like many working in UK healthcare in 2025, Leftwich is hopeful but not getting ahead of himself. But his cautious tone is tinged with excitement that shines through.
“I have never been more frustrated with the state of the NHS in terms of how challenging it is to work and for access as a patient, but I've never been more excited in terms of working in medical technology for the opportunity,” Leftwich enthuses.