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

In March, OBH attended a roundtable hosted by the Digital Catapult. Attendees were senior industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and commentators on private medical insurance and financial products in the UK supporting digital health and care to debate:

• barriers to innovation
• factors that might boost market development
• conditions necessary for the UK to play a leading role in digital health and care

Why should you be interested in digital health?

• digital health and care can allow people to control their health by using their own data to prevent disease or manage conditions
• it is in our best interest to encourage this shift to prevention and monitoring so that we can help people stay healthy and reduce the costs of health and social care

In February 2017, the think tank Reform held a conference on Big Data. The event explored themes including Big Data and the issue of public trust and attitudes; Big Data in healthcare and Big Data in criminal justice.

Our co-founder and CTO, Nasrin spoke on the role of Big Data in Healthcare, and was part of the healthcare panel that looked at the challenges and opportunities of analytics in healthcare. She shared challenges of big data around her professional experience in medicine, the complexity of data governance, and how outcomes-based payments can be used as reimbursement for innovation, smart technologies that can make a difference to people’s lives.

Ellie Bragan Turner joins OBH as a senior health outcomes analyst from the Analytics team at Dr Foster Intelligence. We are absolutely delighted to have Ellie join us.

She studied Biological Anthropology at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and more recently received an MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Ellie joined OBH from the Analytics team at Dr Foster, specialists in healthcare benchmarking, where she worked on developing new performance indicators for the Dr Foster Hospital Guide, collaborating with surgeons on the creation of clinically-relevant personal outcomes, and leading on international best-practice comparison projects. Ellie is interested in the self-management of long-term conditions, and conducted her MSc thesis on self-monitoring of blood sugars in people with diabetes.

We’d like to extend a warm welcome to our newest colleague!

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.