Overview

Epilepsy affects 630,000 people in the UK, costs the NHS around £2 billion every year, and causes three to five deaths every day. The current hospital-centric care model is not meeting the scale of that challenge.

A new commentary, published in Epilepsia Open by our Co-Founder and Managing Director John Terry and long-time clinical collaborator Professor Rohit Shankar MBE, sets out a roadmap for how technology can help change this. The paper examines how the NHS’s own stated strategic shifts: from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention, map directly onto the unmet needs in epilepsy care.

The authors review the landscape of technologies that could enable this shift: point-of-care EEG, long-term brain monitoring, wearable seizure detection, digital apps, and telemedicine. Alongside these, AI-enabled EEG analytics are highlighted as a critical piece of infrastructure. They will be necessary to help make sense of the substantial volumes of data that community-based diagnostics will generate.

The paper identifies a particular challenge: more than 70% of routinely recorded EEGs are inconclusive. An apparently normal EEG neither rules out epilepsy nor confirms an alternative. Recording EEGs at scale in the community would inevitably increase these numbers further. In published research, BioEP has been shown to address this gap directly, providing a risk-stratification rating from clinically non-contributory EEG recordings to support prioritisation for specialist follow-up.

The wider framing matters too. The paper argues that epilepsy care, if transformed successfully, could serve as a blueprint for how the NHS approaches other chronic conditions. That is a significant claim, and it is grounded in the evidence.

Authors

Found in

Epilepsia Open