Medtech startup Outcomes Based Healthcare (OBH) has teamed up with the Big Data Partnership on a £1m project that hopes to save the lives of diabetes sufferers.
A match-funded grant has been secured from Innovate UK to fund the possibly revolutionary project, which will be bring a much more data-driven approach to traditional medical research.
The London-based startup will use medical data about type-2 diabetics combined with non-health data about the same individuals such as income to predict the outcomes of a patients illness well in advance of what is currently possible.
More precise medicine
“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 and CEO at OBH.
He explains that the startup is choosing to focus on diabetes because of the costs related to the disease are so high:
Healthcare is not very customer centric and we are buying the wrong things.
Diabetes often leads to complications such as heart attacks and strokes and the project will use data about those who have suffered from the complications to predict those that they are likely to happen to in the future.
Big data and medicine
The 18-month project hopes to empower doctors by finding patterns and correlations in the data that predict complications of diabetes, far in advance of symptoms appearing.
“Huge amounts of real data holds the secrets to many business and social challenges,” said Mike Merritt-Holmes, CEO and cofounder of Big Data Partnership.
We are thrilled to be able to apply the latest industry thinking and technology to big data from lifestyles, medication, environment and diet to discover a truly innovative way to approach healthcare.
Move to Tech City
OBH previously took less of a tech focus to medicine and Dunbar-Rees puts the move towards big data down to the businesses physical move to East London.
Surrounding themselves by tech startups, the team of ten started working on the assumption that the solution to healthcare’s cost crisis lies in tech and data, well outside their comfort zone of traditional healthcare.