Company Details
Name: Tactuum
Date Founded: 2013
Sector: Life Science
Key Products/Services: Private and public healthcare providers operating at local, regional and/or national levels
Markets: UK, USA, Canada
Website URL: www.tactuum.com
Executive Summary
Tactuum’s approach to innovation is to design in Scotland and commercialise worldwide.
At Tactuum we develop long-term collaborative engagements with Scottish academia and health & social care organisations to design, develop and validate digital healthcare solutions for commercialisation outside of Scotland. Healthcare Improvement Scotland, a special NHS board, and Tactuum have been working jointly in such a capacity since 2022, to design and scale digital innovations across Scotland. Tactuum have successfully employed this model to license the Quris platform outside of Scotland to NHS England, Ministry of Defence (Medical Services), USA healthcare providers (Washington, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana) and 12 African national Ministries of Health.
Tactuum’s approach has been to develop innovations in specific contexts, e.g. epilepsy screening, that can then be scaled horizontally into other clinical areas, e.g. other mental health conditions, and then commercialised outside of Scotland. Quris has been evidenced to improve accuracy of clinical questions, speed up professional decision making, reduce demand on healthcare services and improve patient outcomes.
The Challenge
Knowing what to do or validating a decision can take time even when there are trusted sources of information to call upon, e.g. colleagues, hospital/national guidelines.
Sometimes even finding a trusted information source is not that easy. The consequence can result in non-standardised care, incorrect medical decisions, prescribing errors or ineffective use of healthcare resources. These issues can have a direct impact upon patient healthcare outcomes causing harm or worse.
The Solution
Quris speeds up access to trusted and validated decision support resources and improves the accuracy of the information provided to healthcare professionals. Quris ensures that clinicians have the right information, at the right time, all the time.
The Quris Healthcare Platform has been designed by clinicians across the UK and USA to improve clinical efficiency, productivity and patient outcomes. The platform comprises two core components:
Quris Clinical Companion provides healthcare professionals with access to guidelines, protocols, medical calculators and other resources to support quicker and more accurate decision making.
Quris Patient Companion provides patients, parents and carers with a means of engaging with healthcare teams to support pre-clinic questionnaires, triage, screening, pre/post operative care, rehabilitation and more.
The Impact
From an initial no-cost implementation in NHS Lothian in 2014 focused on supporting Intensive Care Unit (ICU) staff, Quris has now been adopted nationally across the whole of NHS Scotland with an average of 80,000 users each day (called the Right Decisions Service). Quris has also been adopted by NHS Trusts in England, the Ministry of Defence and several large medical providers across the USA. Quris is also being used by Ministries of Health across 12 African countries to deliver antimicrobial stewardship for humans and animals. A small study conducted by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde showed an 75% improvement in the accuracy of answering medical questions by resident doctors.
Within the context of supporting patients, Quris was used for NHS Lothian’s mental health support programme (called PAVES) where screening for conditions in children with diabetes or epilepsy has significantly reduced referral to CAMHS in a bid to improve waiting times for pressured services.
On the basis of these impacts, Tactuum has been listed in the UK Government’s Top 100 Digital Health Playbook.
Future Plans
Tactuum have recently been successful in a joint collaboration with the University of Strathclyde to create a new spin-out focused on supporting people in palliative and end-of-life care. This joint venture will result in a new joint commercial entity that will look to exploit IP and license the solution within and beyond Scotland. Central to this work and the Quris platform more generally is the use of AI to further support clinician and patient decision making and care coordination.