PInCH Medical Systems Ltd was formed in 2010 with a mission to achieve Personal, Integrated Coordination for Health. We wished to create innovative patient-centric applications and information infrastructures to help people better self-manage their health at all stages of life.
We are based in Oxford, London, and Southampton, England, and include a diverse team of leading practitioners and academic researchers.
Find out about our teamPractitioners and patients are increasingly demanding data to enable evidence-based decisions and monitor chronic illnesses. Yet, such data are fragmented across separate organisations and locations with different governance rules and security provisions.
Most conditions require sharing of data between multiple stakeholders for best outcomes. Examples of need for 360 clinical communication are anticoagulant management in atrial fibrillation and diuresis in heart failure. Need for change in warfarin (or switch to NOAC therapy if indicated) or diuretic dose requires rapid and timely information sharing between community and hospital care systems to avoid over or under treatment and potential adverse events. Such change is precisely mediated by a dynamic record of historical and current clinical data and therapy.
However, patient records are siloed across health services, leading to access difficulty, delays, and duplicate work. Relevant data from patients' own devices, such as blood pressure monitors and wearable sensors could be helpful, but are held by commercial organisations with difficult or non-standard access to data. Patients themselves may hold useful health information which cannot easily be input into clinical information systems, such as subjective burden of symptoms or compliance with medication.
Subsequently, clinicians lack access to data which could enable better decisions for patients. Diagnoses have been missed, work has been duplicated, and unnecessary procedures have taken place at cost to the NHS. Similarly, patients lack access to data which could help them make better health decisions.
We saw an opportunity to bridge the information gaps between stakeholders by empowering patients to collect, govern, and share their health information using open standards.
We have developed the LifeCourse, a patient-owned health record. The main entrypoint to LifeCourse is a mobile app, from which patients view and enter health-related information, such as symptoms, medication taking, documents, and data from wearables and health apps. Patients can chart and analyse their data towards achieving health goals or better understanding of their health. Data can be downloaded as a PDF or spreadsheet or shared with the patient's doctors, who use a web portal to analyse and export data.
Data are stored and made accessible using the FHIR open standard and SNOMED-CT vocabulary. Our conformance with standards eases information exchange with existing systems. Data are stored on patients' mobile devices and backed up to secure UK servers.
Our philosophy of giving patients control of their health information could further data ownership by letting patients input and share their own data. Unlike large consumer health and wearable manufacturers, LifeCourse places patients as the owners and gatekeepers of their data.
Numerous projects have attempted to address health information silos to limited success. Unlike these, we are not aiming to disrupt information workflows within clinical settings. Instead, we facilitate patient collection and ownership of data which would otherwise remain fragmented across organisations.
Read more about LifeCoursePInCH believes that widespread adoption of its LifeCourse platform will lead to improved and more cost-effective healthcare outcomes across a wide range of morbidities and co-morbidities was well as improved quality of life generally.
LifeCourse is a breakout innovation, rethinking how health data can be managed and exchanged under patients' control. We have pitched LifeCourse to clinicians and patients across the UK, Germany, and the USA. Responses were positive and highlighted the benefits of LifeCourse to chronic care.
The IP is fully owned by PInCH. The company was established in order to hold, develop, and commercialise intellectual property relating to the LifeCourse healthcare platform and morbidity specific applications, initially for cardio conditions with the plan to expand into other areas. We are strongly informed by our research pedigree, having a team of established academics in medicine, health science, and computer science. PInCH continuously involves clinician and patient advisory groups to identify their needs and elicit feedback.
Read more about our team