Our own co-founder and CTO, Nasrin, has joined the Reform advisory board! Reform is a think tank addressing issues relevant to improving public service performance within affordable budgets – something we are passionate about in regards to health and social care at OBH!

With an invaluable combination of entrepreneurial, technology and healthcare experience, we think she’ll fit right in!

Pam Garside is joining our advisory board and we are absolutely delighted!

Pam has her own management consultancy specialising in organisational strategy and development in health care, and is a Fellow of the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge. She advises new entrants to the UK health market including digital and start up companies and is an angel investor.

Pam founded and co-chairs The Cambridge Health Network and sits on the Investment Committee of Cambridge Enterprise. In 2016 Pam was named one of the 100 most influential leaders in Health Tech by Hot Topics.

Read more about her ventures here.

With technology rapidly advancing, the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare are increasing. Used effectively, AI can be a key tool in helping health services to deliver better outcomes.

Reform recently published a paper “Thinking on its own: AI in the NHS,” supported by our CTO, Nasrin, on the paper’s advisory board. The report describes areas where AI can help the NHS deliver better outcomes, highlights the barriers to implementation along with solutions, and sets out recommendations for AI in the NHS.

AI could reduce the demand on the system, but it’s not going to happen overnight. The authors state that, “the NHS ‘has a long way to go before AI can be effectively leveraged’. Both buy-in from patients and healthcare professionals needs to improve. This will be a factor of time for people to trust this technology and will also partly depend on the AI interface design and explainability. Increasing the user-friendliness and having a clear understanding of human-computer interaction can influence the adoption rate of this technology amongst healthcare professionals.”

To read more on AI in the NHS, see here.

OBH CEO Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees was selected as an NIA Fellow in 2016. He was invited to attend this year’s NIA Summit and Launch where the new fellows were annouced, forming a full cohort of 25, where Rupert also won the prestigious award of Best Participant! We’re extremely proud of Rupert and OBH’s work since being selected into the NIA. Rupert joined a panel advising the new fellows on critical success factors in scaling their innovations. This year’s fellows are spearheading innovations in mental health, urgent and emergency care, and primary care. We look forward to following their journeys.

Since being selected by the NIA, OBH has: gained supplier status on G-Cloud 9, travelled to Brazil as part of the NHS Digital trade mission and Hospitalar Conference, worked with a leading global pharmaceutical/life sciences company to develop outcomes-based commissioning solutions, secured our first US client, and secured a £150K Innovate UK grant for a ‘Real World Outcomes’ project.

Our co-founder and CTO, Nasrin, who is a medical doctor by background, was recently invited as a panellist to the Doctorpreneurs start-up school. The event was aimed at entrepreneurial doctors, medical students and others interested in healthcare entrepreneurship, health technology, and innovation. The start-up school is centred on sharing advice and key insights from successful doctors turned entrepreneurs. Nasrin spoke on bringing digital health product ideas to market, how to evaluate the market, define the problem, and barriers she faced in her journey.

For more information, see here.

EHI Live is a prominent event for digital health and healthcare innovation and we were grateful to present there this year. Rupert spoke to a crowd of CIOs, CEOs, and Board Members, on segmentation and analytics to understand population level outcomes and value.

For successful outcomes based approaches, we need to identify groups of people with similar needs because different population groups need to be responded to in different ways. Getting this segmentation right allows you to achieve the best health outcomes and minimize health care costs – something we pride ourselves in at OBH!

Exciting times ahead at OBH as we win grant funding from InnovateUK for a ‘Real World Outcomes’ feasability study. We will be testing the feasibility of a product to generate Real World Evidence for Life Science companies in pharmaceuticals and devices to test the ability to use existing healthcare and administrative data to measure the impact of an intervention, device, technology or drug, on health outcomes.

Why is it needed?

• Innovations and tech interventions want to measure the impact their service/product has on people’s outcomes
• Pharmaceuticals increasingly needing to show Real World evidence (RWE) of impact, post licensing surveillance, and as a condition of regulatory/licensing approval
• Move from payment for each pill to payment for outcomes
• NHS providers asked to improve outcomes under new outcomes-based contracts are looking at which interventions can have the most impact

We are very excited for this opportunity because by driving the system value of pharmaceuticals and devices, we can create system efficiencies and hopefully ease demands of services.

Our CEO and founder, Rupert, recently spoke to a full house at the UK Health Show! Presenting on outcomes based contracting, Rupert discussed how learning lessons from international models of care signals the way forward for the NHS, specifically in delivering new commissioning, outcomes based, accountable care models. There was only standing room left to listen in on how delivering outcomes over the long-term can allow space for innovation and integrating care around patients, and how the payment mechanism can better support new models of care.

For more information on outcomes based contracting, see here.

Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees, CEO/founder, spoke to a strong 100+ group at the Clinical Commissioning Theatre on ‘New approaches to contracting for whole population-based, outcomes focussed services’. Diving into the detail and sharing case studies where OBH have supported commissioners on segmentation approaches, the difference between segmentation and risks stratification, and why we must think about segmenting populations by similar needs. Continuing the standardised (locally configurable) approach OBH have developed, Rupert shared the challenges around linking datasets and measuring outcomes, giving commissioners and providers the baseline data they need to create their outcomes-based contracts and monitor improvement.

We are delighted to announce that the Crown Commercial Service has awarded Outcomes Based Healthcare supplier status on the latest Digital Marketplace platform, G-Cloud 9.

The OBH Outcomes Platform is available as a Cloud Software Service and provides users with true health outcome measures at a population and cohort/condition level. The Platform offers insights that can help drive clinical decisions, as well as support commissioning decisions for outcomes-based contracts.

In addition, OBH offers a range of support services via the Cloud Support Service framework. These will enable clients to navigate the landscape of health and care outcomes, and prepare them for seamless use of the OBH Outcomes Platform.

Click here for our G-Cloud Outcomes Platform

Click here for our G-Cloud Outcomes Platform Support Services

Senior outcomes analyst Ellie spoke at a symposium at the Government Outcomes (GO) Lab, part of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. The theme was ‘Better Commissioning for Healthier Lives’, and Ellie spoke and led workshops on how to develop an outcomes framework in healthcare. The attendees included an enthusiastic mix from council leaders, commissioners and academics.

We’re excited about hearing more from the GO Lab in the future – a new programme, jointly funded by HM Government, researching innovative public sector commissioning to achieve better social outcomes.

More information on the symposium can be found here.

Watch Ellie’s interview with GO Lab here.

We’re proud to have been selected as one of the fifth cohort of the London Mayor’s Go To Grow Programme. Open to fast-growing companies in tech, urban infrastructure and life sciences, the programme offers bespoke mentoring, workshops and opportunities to be part of international trade missions. Whatsmore, we’ll get to learn from and work with some of the most exciting startups in London. The London tech (and HealthTech) scene has grown massively in OBH’s 4 year history, we’re honoured to be recognised as a small London company with BIG potential!

Later in June, our co-founder Nasrin will be on a trade mission with the deputy Mayor of London to Silicon Valley, as part of the Female Founders in Silicon Valley mission.

http://gotogrow.london/

COO and co-founder, Juliana, spoke at a Yorkshire and Humber AHSN event to an audience from the South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw STP. The event was centred on showcasing the ‘art of possible’ to inspire and enlighten the STP. Six innovations with impacts in healthcare systems were chosen to drive the discussions on self-management, demand management, information repository, clinical decision making, and systems operating between care settings. We were delighted to talk about our population health analytics and engage with influencers and leads who will be driving the STP forward.

We were delighted that our CEO and founder Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees was invited to speak at the Westminster Health Forum on ‘Commissioning Health Services in England: funding, outcomes and delivering Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships ‘. He talked about the power of digital technology in measuring population health outcomes. Chaired by Baroness Jay of Paddington, Rupert shared the stage with a range of enthusiastic thought leaders including Prof. Sir Muir Gray of Better Value Healthcare and Dr Neil Bacon of IWantGreatCare.

We’ve had a great time at Headspace, Farringdon – working amongst exciting tech companies across a range of sectors. We are now continuing the OBH journey back at The King’s Fund (where OBH first started!) – to get closer to many of our partners in the world of healthcare. A trip to Ikea to furnish our new office resulted in a mammoth DIY team-building exercise. We’ve now settled in nicely with shiny new furniture and only a handful of nuts and bolts unaccounted for. We can’t wait to crack on with the next step in the OBH story.

Call & Check is an innovative, yet simple service developed by the island of Jersey’s postal service – Jersey Post. Postmen and women provide a regular visit for individuals who would benefit from a little extra support. They can relay a message, raise concerns or merely offer a helping hand to people in need. The initiative has been so well-received that 9,000 islanders are now caring for people – and there has been interest in replicating the scheme from the Finnish Postal Service and the Henry Ford institute of Detroit.

Our CEO and founder, Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees, spoke at a Call & Check conference on how we can best use outcomes measures to measure those things that matter to vulnerable populations, including  outcomes such as the reduction of isolation and loneliness.

This event focused on sharing the learning coming out of the multidisciplinary community providers (MCPs) and primary and acute care systems (PACS) new care model vanguards. It looked at what is working well and what can be replicated in other areas around the United Kingdom.

In a packed session on sharing the learning, CEO and founder, Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees spoke alongside Dr Cath Briggs, Stockport Together’s Clinical Lead about the development of Stockport Together’s Outcomes Framework. They discussed what we’ve learnt by working on the Stockport Together programme – a project to create better health and care outcomes for the people of Stockport, including a detailed view of whole-population segmentation in Stockport, and the approach to outcome selection and baselining.

The slides are available at: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/events/mainstreaming-pacs-and-mcps-sharing-learning