In March 2015, we were very excited to secure a match funded grant for a £100,000 project from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, to innovate the way health outcomes are measured in diabetes.

Knowledge about specific behaviours, lifestyles and environments is known to reveal insights about how an individual’s condition is most likely to progress and impact on their health outcomes. Through this work, we are creating a new technology to make acquiring this knowledge as easy as carrying your phone in your pocket.

The project is the first to record and correlate quality of life surveys and data from mobile phone sensors harnessing innovative machine learning technology, and we hope it will help healthcare to move beyond the current system of measuring and paying based on activity and processes of care, to understanding the actual impact of their services, interventions and treatments on the patient’s life.

Amid the furore surrounding patient identifiable data, Rupert and Mike Smith (CTO, MedeAnalytics) demonstrated how 21st century privacy enhancing technology can be used to allow data from the whole health economy to be linked at the patient level, enabling rich outcome measures for better patient care.