Outcomes Based Healthcare: Passively Predicting Health Outcomes

Healthcare costs are rising faster than our ability to pay them. According to the ONS, the
UK’s total healthcare expenditure nearly tripled over the past 15 years, rising from just over
£50bn in 1997 to nearly £150bn in 2012, with the management of chronic conditions
accounting for the highest proportion of these costs. Current healthcare systems manage
individuals with chronic conditions based on the experience of what tends to work best for
most of the people, most of the time. Measuring and paying providers on health outcomes is
fundamentally new in global health systems. Many outcomes can only be measured from
patients themselves.
Outcomes Based Healthcare (OBH) is at the forefront of using data science to understand
chronic disease progression at the individual level. Knowledge about specific behaviours,
lifestyles and environments can reveal insights about how an individual’s condition is most
likely to progress and impact on their health outcomes. OBH is creating a new technology to
make acquiring this knowledge as easy as carrying your phone in your pocket.
OBH aims to radically change how we collect patient-reported outcomes. By removing
barriers to actively reporting outcomes data and by engineering novel machine learning
techniques between reported and passively collected data related to how you go about your
daily life and our behaviours, OBH is establishing a new, more precise way to track both
outcomes and the behaviours that affect them. This tool has the potential to help healthcare
move beyond the costly and not particularly effective status quo of measuring and paying
based on activity and processes of care, to one where a healthcare economy can truly
understand how the impacts of their services, interventions and treatments are affecting what
really matters most to people around their health.