UCL dementia programme director outlines how NHS can combine huge data sets to improve understanding of diseases
The NHS is just at the start of capitalising on the data that is accessible to it, according to experts including University College London (UCL) programme director Piers Kotting.
Speaking at The Drum’s Disruption Day event in London last week (27 November) Kotting, who is programme director, for the NIHR National Director for Dementia Research at UCL, called on the industry to create “one more disruption” to actually turn data and research “into something that delivers answers”.
“We see big data as an opportunity to allow us to do both cross sectional and longitudinal analysis of data across all these different diseases [cancer, dementia, stoke etc] and across different data modalities.
“We’ve got the chance to look at big deep data sets like genetic databases, proteomics data… which have massive amounts of data about individual people. Then [also] broad data sets; so in our world we think of the NHS clinical database. In your [marketing] world maybe it’s social data or shopping data, but huge amounts of data in which are captured a lot of environmental variables.”
At UCL, continued Kotting, the university is looking at how it can integrate and collate all the different factors across different scales. For example it is looking at the changes in cells that cause dementia and hopes to combine those with “massive population data sets” to begin to collate the two together to drive understanding.
“We need one more disruption to actually turn this into something that delivers answers,” he added.
His comments chimed with those of fellow speaker Steve Jelley - co-founder and director of innovation and technology company TMRW, who said collecting big data from patients and using it to implement new technologies will play a key role in “keeping the NHS”.
Jelley said that through the use of big, anonymised data sets, patients will be provided with better care and communications from health staff, which will in turn help the organisation, which is under notorious strain.
“Big data leads to better diagnosis and particularly early diagnosis. When you’re looking at anonymised data sets you can start to see impact studies and you start to have predictive functions. You can create better care and better patient involvement by personalised therapies and medicines and event to the extent of just communication with patients who have diseases such as diabetes.
“You’ve got better use of scarce resources and improved patient outcome and it is only through using technologies like this that we will manage to keep the NHS.”
However, he agreed there is not enough disruption happenning due to the lack of forces getting behind healthcare processes.
The change will actually need to come from the general population, he added, who are carrying around “untapped” data in their smartphones, according to Jelley.
“It’s people who are going to create the opportunity to widen this data set because all the untapped resources are environmental factors, and we walk around with the most sophisticated sensor that we could possibly have in our pockets; the smartphone.
“If you have diabetes there’s a plug-in that the NHS can give you for your Android or iPhone device that can measure your blood sugar – that’s how it’s treated. So these sensors, along with their cloud-based equivalents, such as Facebook and Twitter, provide all of the data that we need in terms of tracking environmental data.
"At the moment all of that is tracked through questionnaires and reported analysis which is inaccurate and expensive.”
Kotting revealed that in January NIHR will announce “a new public offering” to help those suffering from the effects of dementia.