Dr Bea Bakshi, C the Signs

Former GP Dr Bea Bakshi was inspired to create C the Signs — a digital tool that helps GPs spot the early signs of cancer — when she spend a hospital nightshift looking after a sick patient who turned out to have incurable pancreatic cancer which had tragically gone undetected. The patient’s reaction was “stoic”, she recalls, but his blunt question stayed with her: “Why was my cancer diagnosed so late?”

This experience was “harrowing for me”, she says, “but it also seemed like an obvious problem we needed to solve upstream”. Most cancers are diagnosed in primary care but, at 58%, early detection rates are poor and “we have few tools or technologies to help GPs with identification,” she explains.

Once deployed in a GP practice, C the Signs integrates with electronic patient records and uses AI technology to spot patients at risk of cancer. “It processes all the information very quickly – in less than a minute,” says Bakshi. “It predicts what type of cancer they may be at risk of and recommends the best pathway for them based on their risk and the availability of local services.”

C the Signs is already being used in 1,400 surgeries, and early results are impressive: it has so far identified 40,000 patients across 50 cancer types, and areas using it have seen a 50% reduction in cancer diagnoses in A&E and a 50% improvement in diagnosis time. The software has 99% sensitivity to cancer, compared to 54% for a GP.

With results like that, why isn’t everyone using it? Bakshi says most ICBs either don’t have funding at all, or have ring-fenced money that can’t be spent on primary care. “Primary care attracts less than 10% of NHS funding,” she says. “We often judge hospitals by how well they manage the front door — the A&E department. But primary care is the front door for everything in healthcare, so why aren’t we investing there?”