New project uses big data to predict complications of diabetes

New project uses big data to predict complications of diabetes

Outcomes Based Healthcare and Big Data Partnership have secured a match-funded grant for a £1 million project from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency for a “Digital Health in a Connected Hospital” funding call. The two parties are working together to lead the drive toward a more personalized, data-driven approach to improving health outcomes in people with diabetes.

The aim of the project is to take big data and advanced analytics a step further, creating a dashboard that provides deep insights into disease progression, to enable doctors and patients to make better decisions about their health. The project will use massive amounts of data to predict an individual’s outcomes and allow pre-treatment of medical complications that really impact the lives of people living with diabetes – heart attacks, strokes, eye disease, kidney disease and limb amputations.

“Healthcare systems are cracking under the pressure of ever-growing global health budgets, partly because we’re treating people with drugs and interventions, without being sure exactly who will benefit from any given treatment,” said Dr. Rupert Dunbar-Rees, former GP and founder/CEO at Outcomes Based Healthcare. “Applying data science and outcomes insight to healthcare systems can fundamentally disrupt current disease management, allowing greater precision in care delivery, and ‘pre-treatment’ rather than simply prevention.”

The aim of the project is to take big data and advanced analytics a step further, to enable doctors and patients to make better decisions about their health.The project will be the first to link huge amounts of health data and non-health data and analyze it using machine learning. It will help healthcare providers make decisions about exactly who, when and how to pre-treat complications of diabetes with an approach that promises to reduce costs and improve the overall health of patients. The technology will empower doctors through finding patterns and correlations in the data that predict complications of diabetes, far in advance of symptoms appearing.

The diabetes prototype will be developed and tested by experts, commissioners, hospitals and GPs by Q2 2016. Once complete, the team will apply the approach to other diseases and patient communities.