The Clinician Helps Hospitals Deliver Personalised Cancer Care with An AI-Driven Digital Health Platform on AWS

Healthcare professionals are under pressure from increasing workloads as populations age and the prevalence of chronic diseases like cancer grow. With greater workloads, clinicians have less time and resources to collect and analyse patient health data to offer improved, personalised treatments.

New Zealand-based startup The Clinician recognised the need to help healthcare organisations transition to value-based care—defined, measured, and delivered based on patients’ self-perceived outcomes and experiences. The company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven ZEDOC platform offers healthcare providers real-time health monitoring, analysis, and risk prediction by collecting health data directly from patients in the comfort of their own homes.  

The Clinician launched ZEDOC in 2015 as an enterprise digital health platform running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Mike Merry, Chief Technology Officer at The Clinician says, “With AWS, we could get our software up and running quickly without any challenges. It’s very nicely tooled for startups with compliance and flexibility delivered straight out of the box.”

While developing ZEDOC, The Clinician became an AWS Partner and joined the AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner Path. By doing so, the organisation could access expertise from AWS to develop its offering while adhering to strict patient-data protocols.

To secure patients’ responses, The Clinician uses a hybrid data storage model with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and AWS Lambda serverless functions to provide patient functionality, and Amazon Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS) to support its transactional database with identified patient records. In doing so, the business can scale to handle peak loads with spikes of up to four orders of magnitude in minutes, while delivering stable and secure functionality for providers.  

One provider using the ZEDOC platform to monitor and act on post-chemotherapy side effects for lung cancer patients is The Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) in Brisbane. ZEDOC sends a weekly questionnaire via an embedded link in a short messaging service (SMS), asking patients to report on 12 key chemotherapy-related symptoms following treatment. These responses help the hospital tailor patients’ post-therapy medications or modify their next chemotherapy session accordingly.

The Clinician worked closely with Lung Cancer Nurse Practitioner at PAH, Rebecca Kimberley, to understand the hospital’s existing processes and key post-chemotherapy side effects, including three outcomes classified as either oncological emergencies or avoidable side effects: a fever over 38 degrees, pain, and a bloody cough. Once the key patient outcomes were determined, they were seamlessly incorporated into the ZEDOC platform so that PAH could launch a project built specifically to their needs. Merry says, “Once we understand the clinical workflow, we can configure entirely new digital care pathways in less than a day and collect patient responses immediately. It’s pretty outstanding that we can offer the healthcare sector a reliable, secure service so quickly.”

By using ZEDOC to capture patient responses, PAH’s oncology team can analyse patient outcomes and actionable information captured and presented in a single, interactive dashboard. Kimberley also receives automated, real-time alerts when any oncological emergencies are reported.

She says, “Previously, I would have had to spend 20 minutes on the phone per patient post-treatment, and it might take me 10 phone calls to find one patient who needs clinical intervention. But with ZEDOC, I can reduce that time spent and identify oncological emergencies immediately, which enables me to prioritise where my clinical skills are most needed.”

Because of the improved efficiency from ZEDOC, the oncology team is able to handle increasing workloads while delivering individualised care. Kimberley says, “Although we’re seeing workloads increase 15 percent a year, we’re able to work smarter with ZEDOC, utilising the technology that we have to maximise patient outcomes.”

Furthermore, with accurate, real-time data on patient conditions, Kimberley can determine which patients can skip hospital consultations and go straight to treatment on their next visit, and who needs a doctor’s review.

“We can decide if a patient is suitable for treatment without a consultation. This saves patients at least a couple of hours of waiting time, plus the cost of making additional trips to the hospital,” Kimberley says. “To know that the decisions we’re making are driven by patient opinions and responses gives us a lot of confidence. In turn, we’re also empowering patients to self-manage and feel confident in reporting their outcomes via the service.”

Aside from PAH, leading healthcare organisations from Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Singapore are using ZEDOC to deliver digital care pathways that monitor and engage patients along their healthcare journey while at home. The Clinician is leveraging AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure to grow its number of healthcare customers worldwide.

The Clinician is part of the AWS Marketplace to deliver its technology to AWS customers globally. In October 2021, the startup launched a series of off-the-shelf, software-as-a-solution (SaaS) digital care pathways on AWS Marketplace, helping to reduce the cost and implementation barriers for healthcare providers.

Merry concludes, “With AWS, we can take a great platform that’s flexible and tweak it for a different set of symptoms, protocols, and workflows. There’s massive potential for ZEDOC to make patients and providers lives easier and for healthcare systems to operate more efficiently.”

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/health/