How can smarter use of data mean that the doctor comes to you rather than you having to go to the doctor? With Tim Jobson, consultant gastroenterologist and Medical Director at Predictive Health Intelligence

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Tim Jobson, a consultant gastroenterologist at the Somerset NHS Foundation Trust in South West England. Tim truly is a product of Oxbridge, having studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge for three years and then Medicine at Oxford for a further three. He went on to take a PhD in Medicine from Nottingham University, and he is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Tim is an expert in what’s sometimes rather unglamorously known as “internal medicine”, and one of his specialist organs is the liver. Since 2021, he’s been the Medical Director and Chief Investigator of a pioneering, data-driven business called Predictive Health Intelligence which is taking a fresh approach to analysing historical blood test data and identifying patients at risk of liver disease.

As he considers the role that data plays in diagnosis of different chronic and acute medical conditions and diseases, Tim zooms in from the stories patients tell their doctors to the results of specific tests and biopsies. By accumulating relevant evidence, healthcare professionals can identify the relative risk or probability that a particular patient is suffering from a particular disease.

We focus on metabolic syndrome – the cluster of conditions that result from the excess of modern life: cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. When we take in more fruit sugar – fructose – than we need, our liver store this as fat. This was fine as recently as 10,000 years ago, before agricultural, industrial, and consumer revolutions, when our ancestors lived a life of feast and famine. But when fatty, salty, sugary foods – particularly those laden with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) – are so readily available, piled high and sold cheap in supermarkets, this sets us up for metabolic syndrome. Something that at least a third of the Western world suffers from today.

One major and silent killer in this cluster of conditions is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. As the clinical lead in a partnership with his local National Health Service Trust and healthcare IT experts, Tim and his colleagues at Predictive Health Intelligence have developed and are rolling-out a case-finding search engine (HepatoSIGHT) which uses the results from historical blood tests taken over a patient’s life to predict whether – without them knowing it – they are suffering from this silent killer.

The annual toll of this disease is eye-watering: it costs £7-13bn a year, causes 30,000 premature deaths, and robs the UK population of more than 100,000 years of healthy life each year. We discuss how HepatoSIGHT could dramatically reduce these numbers and how the same, super-smart approach to using existing health data could help identify other, costly, silent killers, too.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Predictive Health Intelligence – https://predictivehealthintelligence.co.uk

Tim Jobson’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-jobson-0043934b/

PHI on Twitter – https://twitter.com/phi_comms

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