Geospatial exploration, poverty and respiratory problems
One observation that you’re seeing here is a geospatial exploration tool that we built on top of our data hub and it is created to help illustrate the relationship between health deprivation and pollution in a geospatial way. The screenshot that I selected from that application is an illustration of the divide in Belfast a divide that occurs in most cities and you can see there is a divide between red and amber areas which are mostly in the north and west. These are among the most deprived areas in the whole of Northern Ireland and then the green areas which are in the south and the east and they are the most affluent areas in Northern Ireland.
This tool allows us to select different areas, multiple areas and examine the population impacted by pollution, by health, by access to food and various other transport facilities. Things like, that so you can see from the example, I’ve selected three areas in the dark red in the west of Belfast, this covers nearly 7000 people, and approximately 1200 of them are living in poverty and that includes 400 children.
So we used that tool to explore the prescription for respiratory conditions and this slide shows the prescription of salbutamol, which is a symptom reliever for breathing difficulties, the red line is the is the amount of salbutamol used in the three most deprived areas of Belfast and the green line is for the three most affluent areas. What you’re seeing here is that on average 15 times more salbutamol used in more deprived areas when compared to the least. 15 times more is 1500 percent more reliance on relievers for breathing difficulties in the prior areas. Our analysis expands much beyond this and there isn’t really time to go into all of it but everywhere we looked we saw this kind of disparity.
You simply cannot discuss health care and long-term health care or action that you can take on healthcare unless you look geospatially and unless you look at deprivation.
Finding, analysing data, and new open data sources.
With research done we had a plan, we had next steps and we hit our second hiccup, data. Our sponsors included in their support package data. The data that we received was unique, interesting and it had the potential to be really powerful but it was instead quite limited. This is a reflection on how difficult it is for government organisations to just release, that even with strict data sharing agreements, they’re extremely cautious and rightly so about sharing data with partners. When we quizzed our sponsor on the data that they had, they admitted they had so much more but it took them months just to give us the data that they had given already and by the time they’d arranged to to give us more the complete data set that would really help us the SBRI would have been over.
It was time to look for our own data. I’d like to draw your attention to the hugely valuable data resources that are available through the open data initiatives right across the country. For Northern Ireland this means NISRA which is the Northern Ireland statistical research agency a sister organisation to the office for national statistics. The Open Data NI platform and are open data platforms for the UK in general and have immense amounts of information on our public lives, population studies, geospatial poverty that includes education poverty, environmental poverty, and financial property. We have data about GP practices that includes information about the number of people suffering from respiratory problems, cardiovascular problems, long-term health problems. We have a wealth of data on prescription spending all of this data is available but what did we do with it?
What comes naturally to us, as a software company, we hoovered the data out and we created a consolidated database. Consolidated data hub built from 11 different sources of data that covers hundreds of millions of rows, dozens of different aspects of public life in Northern Ireland. We linked and aggregated all of these andcreated a geospatial model that allowed us to explore this data. To provide this data out to other people and to take in new sources of data through data fields, we started looking at building on top of this.
Exploring how the data is related how pollution and health and deprivation are connected we were trying to understand what the data was telling us we were looking for patterns.
Research around Respiratory Problems and Pollution Data
What did we discover when we started looking at this area looking at the problem? so these numbers that you can see in front of you are really for Northern Ireland because this was a Northern Ireland focused project but you can put this into perspective if you remember that for example England has a population of around 30 times NorthernIreland. I don’t have the numbers for England but you wouldn’t be too far off if you take the numbers on the screen and you do the maths in your head and you multiply by 30.
In Northern Ireland there are over 2,000 people every year whose death is attributed to respiratory disease and some small areas in some wards in Northern Ireland that accounts for almost 70 percent of deaths that are linked to respiratory disease.
There’s around 10,000 people admitted to critical care every year with respiratory problems and in fact research shows that 50 of them were admitted in the previous six months. People are coming back to hospital again and again.
One in every 10 times spent on prescription medicine is going on a respiratory medicine like salbutamol.
We also learned about the link between pollution and health, that link is not in dispute, the research literature that you can find has clearly established that connection and what is happening right now, in the cutting edge, is the detail of how these things are connected and the true detail of the kinds of conditions that can be impacted by pollution.
This particular study that you can see in front of you is a few stats a few pieces of information from a King’s College London paper that was released in 2019 and it really personalises the pollution impact. They’re saying that in Manchester if you cut air pollution by 20 you would have 20 fewer lung cancer cases every year, 284 fewer children with a lung function form every year. On higher days pollution in Manchester, every day of high pollution, you get six more cardiac arrests. Every day with high pollution in Manchester you get six more adults and eight more children being taken to hospital.
We also looked at the wider context to try and understand why our SBRI sponsors were interested in this particular challenge and it’s really comes from this idea that was championed by a report on the Northern Ireland health service, from 2016, known as the Bengoa report. It’s a very long report, it’s 100 pages long so I crammed a lot into one slide here but the key thing to notice is that we cost the NHS the most as we get older. Very rapidly as we age into our cost to the NHS rises significantly so it’s the healthy life that we can lead that impacts the NHS. TheBengoa report recognises this and in fact deprivation has a huge impact on health conditions and costs the NHS. With 14 years fewer of healthy life expectancy in deprived areas when compared to the most affluent the report suggests three key changes that the NHS should look to make over the next few years:
– Move away from a model based on achieved care to a model that’s based on the needs of chronic patients, long-term patient care.
– Move away from a reactive model based on curing illness, of course that still has to happen, but to refocus on a proactive model designed to care for long-term health conditions.
– Move away from providing care to actively helping patients manage their own self-care.
So that’s the context behind what has driven this particular SBRI and other initiatives like it around the uk.
What kind of pollution affects people in Northern Ireland and across the uk?
The most well-known perhaps is NO2 that you get from road traffic that’s very common and we understood, especially the backlash recently about diesel cars for example, and the London mayor’s introduction of charges to try and reduce that
There is a secondary source of particulate pollution that is mostly coming from home heating. There’s also ammonia emissions from agriculture but what happens with ammonia emissions is they interact with the air which chemical reactions and they generate particulate pollution.
We’re talking about NO2 and particulate pollution. NO2 is primarily a lung irritant, and that is not in any way to downplay its impact on people, it has huge impact on people dealing with with breathing conditions but particular pollution is strongly linked with causing respiratory conditions, causing lung cancer, triggering strokes, triggering cardiovascular disease and most recently is actually linked to causing dementia.
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the webinar, Creating Clean Air for Healthcare: an SBRI Story, my name is Lucy Wakeford i’m the head of online at Digital Leaders and it’s my pleasure to be chairing this session. Before I introduce our presenter I’d firstly like to recap the topic to give anyone who might be running late a chance to join this webinar will be a brief exploration of what it is like to take part in a Small Business Research Initiative, an SBRI competition. It will include what we learned about working with open data the successes and missteps along the way and how Anaeko used data to understand the impact of pollution and deprivation on health and why it matters.
I’d now like to introduce Roger Wallace who’ll be taking us through today’s webinar with over 25 years of experience across academia research and industry Roger is a business analyst and data analyst with deep technical knowledge and a broader experience across software architecture, analytics, platform design, development and operations over the past decade. Roger has specialised in hybrid and multi-cloud data analytics drawing on years of experience in the design and development of data integration and data management project products.
Thank you Lucy and thanks everyone for for joining. My name is Roger and i work for a Belfast based software company called Anaeko, so this is hopefully going to be a short talk about our experience in taking part in a healthcare initiative. Anaeko is a software company, we’ve been in operation for 15 years now and we specialise in data, cloud management, data migration, data analysis and both tactical and strategic data optimisation.
Now that sounds like a bit of an advert for us and I guess it is but it’s useful just to set the context for our involvement in this project which was a healthcare innovation project. We have worked for government, large enterprise for banks, telecom companies and cloud infrastructure providers but throughout our history we’ve also been involved in smaller innovative projects, for startup companies, helping them build their platforms and explore their business ideas. We’re currently excited about opportunities around smart city initiatives and how they fit with our skills and our experience.
So this talk is going to be a short one about our experience of working on a healthcare SBRI. For those of you who are not familiar with what an SBRI is i can come back to that shortly. I will cover what we did, the kind of challenges that we experienced and what we learned along the way, including some surprises or hiccups that we encountered.
An SBRI is a government funding program that matches government challenges with business innovation. It’s a Small Business Research Initiative and it’s been running for 20 years, so it’s not a new thing and it’s based on an American model that goes back to the 80s. The key thing to know for this talk about an SBRI that as opposed to other funding initiatives it’s run as a competition. There are rules, rules about fairness and also rules and guidance about how the SBRI sponsor should get involved and that has implications to this story.
So let’s look at the problem statement for the SBRI that we were involved in. It’s a solution that helps to demonstrate the link between air pollution and ill health on a geographical basis. To help those with long-term health conditions manage their exposure to air pollution to empower citizens to make better life choices, to enable GPs to better manage and plan care for people with long-term conditions and possibly to enable consultants to develop new pathways of care for long-term economic conditions. Our sponsor for this SBRI was primarily the health department for Northern Ireland but there was additional support from the Department of the Environment and Belfast City Council. There are projects like this happening across the UK looking at pollution and looking at empowering people to manage their health so this is just one of many that are running in recent years.
Let’s look again at the idea of this Small Business Research Initiative and its competition element. The guidance to SBRI sponsors includes instructions to support the innovation but not to direct it, do not provide detailed definition of challenge, avoid working too closely with competitors to drive that innovation because you just end up driving everyone in the same direction rather than encouraging a surprise and encouraging that innovation. I would say that from Anaeko’s perspective that was our first hiccup along the way because in a perfect world Anaeko works to solve problems with customers, we expect customers to fully engage, that isn’t always the case, but we work best when we can work with a customer to understand and analyse their problem.
The SBRI competition is exceptionally even-handed it is fair and seem to be fair and in practical terms that really means little help, little guidance, minimum engagement, you’re effectively on your own. In situations like this what we do is nominate someone within Anaeko to take on that role of a customer, that stakeholder, who can help drive the project to effectively become an expert and for this project, partly that’s because I have experience in research and I sometimes play this role within those projects. For me personally I was interested in being involved in this because I had two sons who when they were younger were both admitted to hospital with breathing difficulties and in fact my eldest son ended up in intensive care for four days. This was 11 years ago and I still vividly remember at the time no one really wanted to explain how two boys could be hospitalised on the same day. One consultant did mention or suggest environmental causes but wouldn’t be drawn on that and it wasn’t really until I got involved in this SBRI that I started to understand potential reasons for what happened.
“Smart City” is a term used to describe an urban area that utilise technology to both improve existing services, and to solve new and emerging issues that Urban Living and Urban Growth present. The world is an increasingly urbanised place. The United Nations state that in 2018 55% of the world’s population lived in urbanised areas, with growth projected to see this increase to around 68% by 2050. Managing this growth and the required extension of services and resources to accommodate it is a huge challenge for local and national governments across the world.
One area in which cities are looking at is mobility. Connected, transparent and digital urban transport processes to benefit citizens mobility and environment. Technology is reshaping cities and changing the way we travel, with citizens wanting more environmentally friendly options, real-time information and effective public transport. As new technology is increasingly introduced into cities some trends can be seen:
1. Vehicle automation: the potential to create new opportunities within the public and private sector. Moving people around city centres effectively is becoming a growing challenge and cars can create an ever-moving network to make real-time adjustments, ease congestion and report on road conditions. A city will need a physical infrastructure to handle autonomous vehicles that includes an IT infrastructure to manage data storage, performance, security and resilience.
2. Electric powered vehicles: Smart Cities are at the forefront to switch to electric transport and with increased urbanisation a focus is on carbon-neutralising cities. Electric vehicles are part of the solution towards cleaner transport, better air quality and climate change.
3. Shared mobility: Mobility as a Service is growing within cities with more accessible transport, on demand options, so citizens can use their preferred mode of transport on a short-term basis. The most well known car-share services is the likes of Uber making it quicker and easier. Another common service is bike-sharing with easy access to bike stations around cities with online payment plans.
4. Digital information: as technology is integrated into different areas of city transport data can be collected and shared to help bridge information gaps making public services more efficient, enhance decision making and deliver real-time schedules and information to users.
By introducing more technology to transport with real-time information and mobile applications the customer experience is enhanced and citizens can make more efficient and informed mobility choices.
“95% of rail users would be more likely to use the rail network in their city if technology-driven solutions were implemented.”
Now is the time for governments and companies to collaborate and innovate, leading the way, defining good practice to enable data sharing and technology development to encourage increased adoption for Smart City industries.
“A cornerstone of the smart city is the dismantlement of so-called ‘silos’, or the “isolation of individuals and departments in different units, people and groups who share little and who indeed hoard information valuable to others” (iglus.org)
Connectix is a Smart Cities Collaborative Network for Northern Ireland. Connectix brings together seven of Northern Ireland’s leading technology companies to scope and study the opportunities for collaboration in addressing the ever-growing and global “Smart City” marketplace. Find Out More:
Anaeko is delighted to announce our membership of leading trade association British Water to support our growth and development as a specialist data & analytics solutions provider in the water sector.
British Water has a varied membership of companies covering all sectors of the water and wastewater industry. Their members design, build, operate, maintain and provide critical solutions, technologies and research for water and wastewater assets at home and internationally. The association works to bring a leading and coherent voice on behalf of the supply chain and ensure that members have access to the information and contacts they need to enhance their business.
As well as actively promoting best practice, British Water liaises with government, regulators and represents the interests of the UK water and wastewater industry on UK and European regulations and legislation, terms and conditions of contract and procurement practice, and in the creation of European and International Standards.
Anaeko’s focus on the water sector builds upon our strategic relationship with Northern Ireland Water where, in collaboration with water industry specialists, we are utilising data and analytics to deliver operational improvements in areas such as water pumping efficiencies, leakage analysis and asset & telemetry alignment.
As a member of British Water, Anaeko will increase our profile, enhance business growth opportunities and contribute towards best practice in the water and wastewater industry. We will apply our innovation techniques, depth of technical expertise and cross sectoral experience to actively collaborate alongside other members to address the environmental, regulatory and societal challenges of the sector.
