Deontics Raises £1.2M to Give Every Clinician a Personalised Patient Treatment Guide

Deontics, a UK health technology company, has raised £1.2 million to develop its clinical decision support software. The company builds tools that help doctors and clinicians navigate the clinical guidelines and evidence-based recommendations that define best practice in medicine, by processing a patient's specific clinical information and generating a personalised treatment guide that applies the relevant guidelines to their individual circumstances.

Clinical guidelines — evidence-based recommendations for how to diagnose and treat specific conditions — represent the accumulated wisdom of the medical profession, but applying them consistently and correctly in the complexity of real clinical practice is genuinely difficult. Guidelines are often long and technical, exist across hundreds of conditions and procedures, and interact in ways that are not always explicitly addressed: a patient with multiple comorbidities may be subject to guidelines from three different specialties that make partially conflicting recommendations, and determining how to balance these requires expertise and judgement that junior clinicians or generalists may not have readily available. The result is that care varies significantly between clinicians and settings, with meaningful consequences for patient outcomes.

Deontics addresses this by building software that encodes clinical guidelines in a format that can be applied automatically to patient data. When a clinician enters or imports a patient's relevant clinical information — diagnosis, medications, test results, contraindications — the system processes this against the applicable guidelines and produces a personalised treatment recommendation that reflects both the guideline's requirements and the patient's specific situation. This helps ensure that all patients receive care that reflects current best practice rather than relying entirely on the individual clinician's recall and judgement under the time pressures of a busy clinical setting.

The funding will be used to develop the clinical knowledge base, build integrations with NHS electronic health record systems, and establish partnerships with NHS trusts and clinical networks for validation and adoption.

Sources

• Deontics — company website