The Power of Statistics in Digital Health

The two week wait (2ww) pathway exists to improve the clinical outcomes of patients with suspected cancer. In head and neck cancer, a difficult diagnosis domain, only 10% of referrals to the pathway require further treatment, significantly effecting the delivery of this service. At LifeQueue, we hope to build tools to address this problem by enhancing the way GPs refer, and how these referrals are prioritised in secondary care. To achieve this we have applied machine learning methods to data representing the symptoms of 5,000 referrals with 400 positive cancer diagnoses. This talk will elaborate on the methods explored, and discuss how they might be applied in other diagnosis situations.