Deontics

Deontics is a London-based clinical AI company that builds decision support software to help doctors apply evidence-based guidelines to the individual circumstances of their patients. Spun out from Oxford University, University College London, and Cancer Research UK, the company has over a decade of experience developing AI systems for primary and secondary healthcare, with particular depth in oncology and cancer multidisciplinary team decision-making.

The clinical problem Deontics addresses is one of medicine's most persistent challenges: the difficulty of consistently applying complex, frequently updated clinical guidelines to the specific characteristics of each patient. Guidelines encode the best available evidence about how to diagnose and treat conditions, but their application in real clinical settings is complicated by the volume and technical complexity of guidance, the presence of comorbidities that create competing recommendations, and the time pressure of busy clinical environments. The result is significant, measurable variation in the quality of care delivered between clinicians and settings — with direct consequences for patient outcomes.

Deontics' platform encodes clinical guidelines into a machine-readable format that can be applied automatically to patient data from electronic health records. The system processes a patient's relevant clinical information — diagnosis, medications, test results, contraindications — against the applicable guidelines and produces a personalised treatment recommendation that is transparent, explainable, and traceable to its source evidence. Clinicians receive a clear, individualised guide rather than having to recall and apply guidelines manually under time pressure.

The platform has been validated in clinical trials and deployed in NHS settings, with published research in BMJ Open and the British Journal of Cancer, as well as a 2025 study in BJU International demonstrating AI-driven streamlining of prostate cancer MDT recommendations at a UK NHS trust. Deontics raised £1.2 million to continue developing its clinical knowledge base and building integrations with major NHS electronic health record systems.