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

In what was a busy month for OBH, we were delighted to speak at this year’s UK e-Health Week alongside an impressive panel from MedeAnalytics and East and North Herts CCG, discussing the practical steps required to make commissioning for outcomes a reality in the NHS. One of the themes that came out of the debate was that, though the quality of coding has improved in recent years (a key enabler), measuring and paying for outcomes is still very much in development in the NHS. MedeAnalytics provided some useful examples of data sharing and budget pooling amongst providers from the US, including examples of bonuses for outcomes being added to contracts. Our co-founder Ju also gave one of our favourite outcomes quotes in her response to an audience question: “Outcomes happen where life happens, not where care happens”. We totally agree.

Big data is definitely big news in healthcare at the moment, and in April we went to Southampton to take part in an event to explore the topic in more depth. Alongside local CCGs, academic institutes and public health experts, we enjoyed discussions on the opportunities presented by big data, practical examples of how Big Data is being used to improve services, and – of course – some of the challenges too. We’re excited to hear more from colleagues in Wessex as they develop their big data vision, and you can access our slides from the event here.

Co-founder Nasrin was delighted to be invited by our friends at Doctorpreneurs to attend their ‘Careers in Healthcare’ event back in March. The evening was a great opportunity to catch up with other healthcare startups, and to meet lots of talented London Business School students who were either aspiring to build their own healthcare startup, looking to spend some time working in one or just curious to hear what it is like to be at the helm of one.  Find out more and look out for future events here.

In February, Rupert, our CEO/founder and Nasrin, our CTO/co-founder, were delighted to be interviewed by Doctorpreneurs, the online community for medical entrepreneurs. They outlined the work OBH does in developing, measuring and visualising outcomes, as well as sharing highlights from their careers to date, and some tips for budding doctorpreneurs.

“Our job is to come up with metrics that help the health system know whether they are doing any good. But importantly we don’t come up with these; patients do. We just find ways of using data to accurately measure them. ”

Read more here.

Earlier this year Rupert joined expert speakers from across the globe at the Arab Health Congress in Dubai.  He spoke about the potential of big data in health, and the ability it gives us to passively predict outcomes.

Rupert outlined the work of apps such as  Ginger.io, which analyses smartphone data to predict when patients with mental illnesses are symptomatic, as well as telling the conference about OBH’s own smartphone app, which uses sensors on smartphones to predict patient reported outcomes in diabetes.

Our co-founder Rupert joined Mike Meritt-Holmes, CEO of the Big Data Partnership to speak at EHI Live 2015 on big data and outcomes. They shared an overview of the joint project OBH and BDP are currently working on to improve health outcomes in people with diabetes.

The project is the first to link huge amounts of health data and non-health data and analyse it using machine learning to support healthcare providers in making decisions about exactly who, when and how to pre-treat complications of diabetes.

As one attendee on the night tweeted, “it’s not often you have a queue out of the door for an event run by an accounting firm!”

Our co-founder Nasrin was delighted to be asked to deliver the keynote speech at KPMG’s Healthtech event, telling the story of OBH’s growth and first few years in business in front of a very full house.  The evening was a great opportunity to celebrate the successes of UK Healthtech companies, and to share ideas and innovations with like-minded colleagues over a (not very healthy!) pizza.

We were extremely proud earlier this year when our CTO Nasrin was named in this year’s Management Today 35 Women Under 35.

Dual trained in both Computer Science and Medicine, we’ve always known Nasrin was remarkable, so it’s nice to see others agree with team OBH! In her interview for the piece, Nasrin said: “I’d seen, first hand, the inefficiencies in healthcare and wanted to try and fix them. Life’s short; I saw that working in A&E. You have to put money aside and do what makes you happy.”

Interestingly, 29% of the list this year are entrepreneurs, revealing just how much startups and smaller businesses are now influencing the wider industry.

Well done Nasrin!

How do you build public trust in data sharing schemes? Our CEO Rupert joined a panel of experts at the Sowerby eHealth Symposium in July to share ideas on the subject.

The conference, chaired by Professor the Lord Ara Darzi, was a great chance to highlight the benefits to patients from data sharing, and to meet up with others who have been working to join up information across the NHS for a thought provoking morning of data debate.

In July, we spoke at three workshops organised by Primary Care Commissioning which focussed on developing outcomes based indicators, and ensuring that we are measuring services against the right things when we contract for outcomes.

Our CEO Rupert and COO Juliana led two discussions as part of the day – one on developing the right outcomes and the second on creating the right indicators.

What are the right outcomes?

We covered the importance of engaging with patients to understand what matters to them, as well as addressing the frequent myth that outcomes are too difficult to define. We think that defining useful, meaningful and measurable outcomes is possible once you identify groups of people with similar needs, otherwise known as segmenting your population. And those outcomes are remarkably consistent across similar groups of people in different localities.

Creating the right indicators

Identifying existing indicators or creating new ones to better demonstrate improved outcomes is crucial. We discussed the different types of indicators (both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’), as well as techniques to match outcomes to existing PROMS.

Get in touch to find out more about our approach to defining and measuring outcomes.