38: Harnessing Big Data & AI in Healthcare with George Batchelor from Edge Health

15 Minutes With The Doctor: Learn from Healthcare Entrepreneurs and Innovators

George Batchelor is the Co-Founder and Director of Edge Health, a data-driven agency that helps healthcare providers be more efficient through better and more intelligent use of their data. The company has various data products that have supported various hospitals, charities and supported nationally with Covid-19 analytics. Learn about how they harness data to improve efficiency, how their journey started and why they value trust so much in their business. Key Messages: What is Edge Health? Edge Health started in 2017 to help the health service better use the data they routinely collect. Their work broadly covers a consultancy-type service and developing data products, which are tools that use the data collected to help with day-to-day decision-making. Why aren’t hospitals using their data effectively? It’s a combination of several things, and some of these areas are changing every day now. These data are often collected for different purposes almost routinely. For example, within an appointment booking system. The tools used often are not well suited for linking all of the data together. What are some of the data products that Edge Health uses? Edge Health saw an opportunity where they could use historical data that’s been collected to provide insight into booking processes. The company developed the data product Space Finder, a mini-software that runs routinely on the healthcare system, which sees outputs every time there’s new data. How accurate are the predictions that Edge Health makes about operating rooms? It’s very accurate because there’s so much data that’s being collected over the year. They look at factors such as the consultants, the operations, the patients, and basically anything they can get a hold of. They use machine learning algorithms, which allow them to take a massive amount of previously unmanageable data and make good sense of it and good predictions. How much does the Data Product cost? Edge Health has all of its data products on a framework called G-Cloud, which is publicly accessible. The space finder costs £ 36 000 to set up, which effectively continues indefinately. Hospitals can use that tool to enable their transformation program with one organisation saving £3 million. Advice for somebody setting up their own consultancy in healthcare Having solid relationships where you know what people want and giving them what they want is really helpful . Set up your infrastructure well at the start. What is the crucial factor for Edge Health? It’s Trust. Where is health tech in 5 years? There will be a degree of consolidation around the market offering. There will be more prominent organisations offering bigger suites of solutions. There’s a big question about how hospitals and new electronic patient records will evolve and how they will be accessible or not accessible to developers or organisations who can add a degree of intelligence to some of the databases they provide. Links: Connect with George Batchelor on LinkedIn Once Daily: https://www.oncedaily.co/healthcare-data-analysis/