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Case N° 03 / 03
Helia Diagnostics · Healthcare · 2024

A clinical decision-support layer over 3.1M anonymised patient records.

We built a decision-support layer that helps Helia's consultants reach diagnoses faster and with more consistency — and we built it under the regulatory and audit constraints of a Class IIa medical device.

Plate — 032024
Helia Diagnostics — cover image
Manchester · Edinburgh · BelfastHelia Diagnostics
Client
Helia Diagnostics
Sector
Healthcare
Year
2024
Region
Manchester · Edinburgh · Belfast
Duration
16 months · MHRA-aligned
Team
Two ML engineers, one clinical informaticist, one product engineer, one regulatory lead
Brief

Helia operates fifteen diagnostic imaging centres across the United Kingdom. The clinical leadership had identified a measurable variance in time-to-diagnosis between centres — a variance that mapped to consultant tenure, not to case complexity. They wanted to close that gap without removing clinical judgement from the loop. The solution had to be evidence-aware, audit-ready, and certified for clinical use.

Challenge

Decision-support tools in healthcare are easy to demo and very hard to deploy. The system had to satisfy MHRA classification, integrate with three different RIS/PACS configurations, respect the GMC's good medical practice guidance on AI assistance, never over-state confidence, and — most importantly — be something working consultants would actually open at 02:00 on a Saturday. We had to build for the night shift, not the boardroom.

Approach

How we went about it.

01
Clinical leads, not data scientists, in the lead
We embedded a clinical informaticist as a co-author from week one, not as a reviewer at the end. Every model behaviour, every confidence threshold, every UI element was specified by the clinical team and then engineered by us — not the other way around.
02
Retrieval over guidelines, not over training data
The system grounds every suggestion in NICE guidance, the centre's own protocols, and the published evidence base — retrieved at query time, citation-attached. Consultants do not have to trust the model; they have to read the citations. The model's job is to surface the right pages, not to be right itself.
03
Six months of registry-only running
The system ran in registry mode for six months — capturing suggestions and citations against the consultant's own diagnosis and treatment plan, with no influence on care. Three thousand four hundred cases later, we had the prospective evidence pack the regulator wanted, the variance map the clinical leadership wanted, and the model behaviour we wanted. Only then did we go live.
04
Audit by design
Every retrieval, every model output, every consultant interaction is logged with cryptographic integrity. Helia's clinical governance committee can pull a complete trail for any case in under a minute. That capability is what allowed the medical director to sign the deployment off.
In their words
I do not want a tool that argues with me. I want a tool that hands me the right page of evidence at the right moment. That is what they built.
Medical Director, Helia Diagnostics — Manchester
Outcomes

What it delivered.

38%
reduction in mean time to diagnosis
+10.8pp
second-opinion agreement
3.1M
records under the system
Class IIa
MHRA classification
100%
decisions audit-traceable
01
38 per cent reduction in mean time to diagnosis
Measured across the same case mix, the same consultants, and the same centres against the prior twelve months. The variance between centres has narrowed to a clinically insignificant range.
02
Better second-opinion convergence
Where two consultants reviewed the same case independently, agreement at first read rose from 81.6 per cent to 92.4 per cent. The disagreements that remain are now usually about treatment plan, not diagnosis.
03
Regulatory and clinical confidence
MHRA classification achieved. Royal College of Radiologists informed and engaged. Three peer-reviewed publications submitted by Helia's clinical team using the registry data.
Selected stack
Claude 3.5 Sonnet (clinical instance)Llama 3 (on-prem)FHIR R4DICOMwebPostgresElasticAWS HealthLakeVault for KMS
A similar problem in your business

If the shape of Helia Diagnostics’s problem rhymes with one of yours, the most useful conversation is rarely an email exchange. We will sit with two of your operators for an hour and tell you whether we can help, whether someone else can help better, or whether the problem is not yet ready to be solved. That conversation is on us.