We were excited to pitch at the Osborne Clarke (OC) Digital Health Event, where 10 new and established companies pitched in ‘Dragons’ Den’ style to an audience of investors and digital health enthusiasts (who were much friendlier than the fire-breathing investors from the BBC show!).

Each audience member was given a generous amount of (fake) OC cash to ‘invest’ in a winner. We had a brilliant time meeting other innovators, healthcare enthusiasts and investors.

We’re delighted that OBH CEO Rupert has been selected to be a fellow of the 2016 NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA)!

NHS England Medical Director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh and US digital health expert Professor Robert Wachter revealed in November eight health innovations to join the NHS Innovation Accelerator for 2016. The innovations chosen include the OBH’s Outcomes Platform – a web-based product that measures whether care provided is making a meaningful difference to people’s lives.

The NIA is a programme set up by NHS England in partnership with 15 Academic Health Sciences Networks, and is designed to “support exceptional individuals with a passion for learning and a commitment to share their learnings widely, scaling evidence-based innovations for greater patient benefit.”

The key focus for OBH is to shift measurement and reimbursement away from simply volume of illness treated, towards improving people’s health. The OBH Outcomes Platform supports NHS commissioners and care providers, who are actively working towards building value-based healthcare models in their organisations. It enables health systems to organise care between different providers more effectively, around outcomes that are important for people. With NIA support we’re aiming to have the platform being used across the country, covering at least 10% of England’s population in the next year.

“Being selected by NHS England as one of its eight innovations for 2016 is a fantastic opportunity to move to rewarding NHS organisations not only for the great work they do to treat patients, but for the serious efforts being made to prevent serious adverse events,” said Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees. “This reflects the huge amount of hard work the NHS is now putting into defining, measuring and paying for the things which actually matter to people.”

We very much look forward to working closely with both NIA mentors and our fellow NIA innovators in making healthcare work better for patients, watch this space!

You can find out more about the NIA, as well as information on past and present fellows here.

The OBH family is growing quickly! We’d like to extend a warm welcome to Nico, Aseem and Andrew – three new members of #teamOBH!

Nico brings a wealth of NHS experience from his roles as Head of Business Intelligence and Performance at Herts Valleys CCG, and Head of Informatics at East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust. He also has lots of experience outside the NHS – including in finance, retail and music. WIth a background in computer science, leadership and an MBA, we’re excited to have Nico’s expertise at OBH.

Aseem is a junior doctor based in Oxford, who is currently undertaking some exciting research in the field of radiology. He has been passionate about innovative ways to improve health outcomes since he was a medical student, and in addition to academia has worked in health strategy and government policy. Aseem is most excited by being able to complement his clinical duties by working on improving health outcomes on a wide scale.

Andrew joins us from Canada, where he was a senior analyst at University Health Network for four years. When not at OBH you will find Andrew travelling or at London Hackspace collaborating with others on a number of unique projects. We know how much Andrew loves to travel, and one of his first roles will be to represent OBH’s Sense 360 app at the World Innovation Summit for Health in Qatar.

More information on Nico, Aseem and Andrew, as well as the rest of the team can be found here.

OBH’s Sense360 app continues to generate buzz as it’s featured as one of the innovation showcases on display at this year’s World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH). WISH was launched in 2012 and serves to promote and facilitate innovation in healthcare across the world. This year’s Summit will take place 29th to 30th November at the Qatar National Convention Center, in Doha. The Sense360 app will be showcased with 20 other companies that represent some of the world’s most exciting healthcare innovations, ranging from practical devices and business models, to design-based solutions. The event will be attended by more than 1,000 global leaders, including government officials and healthcare experts to tackle the world’s most pressing healthcare challenges.

The Sense360 app has been featured in numerous articles and conferences, and recently won the Mobility Solution of the Year at the European IT and Software Excellence awards. It’s a research app that aims to continuously and passively measure health outcomes using smartphone sensor data. It was created in collaboration with SoftServe to help healthcare systems measure and pay for the value they provide.

“We hosted another Health Tech Dinner – and were delighted to be joined by friends from the following companies: Attain, ABC, ZPB, Aparito, Raremark, Accurx, Ctrl Group, Distillr, Ocushield, Results, Thriva, Wellvine, Medopad, Virgin, Hellopronto, the BMJ, Saatchi & Saatchi, Results International, Cydar, Number8, and Cox (amongst others!).

Along with catching up with old and new friends, we discussed some of the really tough questions in healthcare:

– How can we build innovative products or services that are truly disruptive, and are affordable and accessible, to improve health and care?
– Do we understand the real problems we face as a society, and how can we utilise technology to solve them?
– How can we sell our products or services to the NHS or any other healthcare system?

We enjoyed a thrilling talk from Chris Lewis, Partner at Results International who called on his immense experience in fundraising and exit strategies in healthcare.

No Tech Dinner would be complete without a 360 degree video – and our thanks go to Maneesh Juneja for recording this.

We very much look forward to the next one, watch this space!”

Highland Marketing hosted a guest interview with OBH in October. Here, OBH CEO – Rupert argues that although the need for better outcomes has become widely accepted in the NHS, we need to disentangle outputs from outcomes.

There are however, reasons for optimism. More than ever there’s an appetite amongst healthcare organisations to focus on developing a patient-centred approach to measuring quality, and lots of work is being done at the moment across the NHS aiming to move towards a more personalised and responsive health system. The future is bright!

Read more here.

The OBH Sense 360 smartphone app was featured in July’s edition of the Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry journal. We explained how the project will initially involve collecting lots of passive and patient-reported data, and then using machine learning analysis to find out which measures could be used to predict health and wellbeing. The work is funded by a £100,000 grant from Innovate UK.

The project is the first to correlate patient reported outcomes, passive data from sensors and machine learning. Our hope is that it will be used to help move healthcare commissioning from focusing on processes of care, to valuing the outcomes that matter most to patients.

http://www.obhsense360.com

You can read the whole article here.

Telemedicine Magazine included an article on OBH in their series focusing on the growing trend of doctors getting involved with healthcare startups. Rupert, OBH CEO, explained that during his time as a GP he was ‘frustrated that we were terrible at understanding whether we are making a difference to people’s lives in a systematic way”.

He ended with some sound advice for aspiring medical entrepeneurs: “if you’re having these [entrepreneurial] ideas early, listen to them. There are lots of people who are very unhappy in medicine, and even though they are doing wonderful jobs, their skills could very well be deployed elsewhere”.

Read the rest of the story here.

Rupert spoke at the Westminster Health Forum (WHF), which was titled ‘Improving diabetes outcomes: personalisation, innovation and rolling out the Diabetes Prevention Programme’. The WHF regularly hold events bringing together policymakers and healthcare stakeholder to collaborate on health policy. Rupert shared a stage with clinicians and policy makers, and discussed ways to promote earlier diagnosis, provide more consistent care and how we can use data to improve outcomes in people with diabetes.

The OBH team could be found at the Health+Care 2016 conference at London’s ExCel Centre. In addition to running a stand with our partner Capsticks, Rupert spoke on stage in a session chaired by Dr Foster, about how CCGs are beginning to use value-based metrics.

Watch Rupert talk here about the importance of measuring metrics and creating meaningful local measures, relevant to high quality healthcare performance.

The Digital Health Innovation event was hosted by law firm Osborne Clark, and Rupert joined a panel of guests with a range of interests including machine learning, engineering and digital health law. We were particularly excited to hear from Dr Adam Hill, Chief Medical Officer at McLaren Applied Technologies – who explained how the sensors of a Fomula 1 car, real time data analytics, predictive analytics and its software platform are relevant to healthcare.

Read more about it here.

OBH CEO Dr Rupert Dunbar-Rees chaired a discussion at the Royal Society of Medicine event – ‘Effective Patient Centred Integrated Care for Children, Young People and their Families’. The day was aimed at helping individuals involved in paediatric healthcare to understand how ‘children and families themselves, workforce development and the introduction of new models of care can be utilised to improve quality of care and health outcomes.’

Rupert’s session in particular focused on how best to use Patient-Centred Outcome Measures (PCOMS) to improve care in acute paediatric services and in caring for those with a complex disability. You can catch up on people’s thoughts during the event by using the twitter hashtag #ChildPatientCare

Find more info here.

We’re delighted to welcome Ivan to the Outcomes Based Healthcare family! A medical student at UCL, Ivan has already started a non-profit organisation called Limitless Generation CIC and a healthcare smartphone app – SUVERA. He has a keen research interest in healthcare systems and how technology can make them better in the future – we think he’ll fit in well at OBH!

Big Data Leaders Europe is the largest big data event in the life sciences sector – bringing a range of key figures together under one roof. Our CEO, Rupert, was part of a panel discussing the use of digital health system solutions in Europe’s healthcare systems. The panel discussion, where Rupert was joined by NHS Clinical Information Officers, centred on how using digital healthcare can empower patients, improve therapeutic outcomes and generate efficiency savings.

In May, Rupert headed up to Leeds for the third in a series of events hosted by Primary Care Commissioning focused on outcomes-based approaches to buying diabetes services.

Rupert told the audience that diabetes was leading the way in trying out innovative outcomes-based approaches to commissioning care, helped by the clearly defined patient group and the consensus on which outcomes to measure.

We were delighted to take part and this blog sums up the debate better than we could!

Great news for team OBH in April, when our Android app Sense360 won Mobility Solution of the Year at the European IT and Software Excellence awards. Developed alongisde our partners at Softserve, the app predicts outcomes such as quality of life in people with diabetes by collecting both actively entered patient-reported outcome survey data and continuous passively gathered sensor data. The app uploads and stores this data securely on Parse.com and Amazon Web Services, and downloads it for machine learning analysis to identify correlations.

“OBH is an innovative company that is pushing the healthcare boundaries by focusing on a truly outcomes based model. We are proud that our team were able to take OBH’s vision, research, and measurement approach, and turn it into the unique Sense360 app which will allow clinical staff to understand their patients in a holistic manner and find correlations within their behaviors.” said Alex Amelin, SVP Client Success, SoftServe.

We think it’s rather nifty, let us know what you think! @obhsense360