Esri UK: Understanding national and local patterns in digital health

Esri UK use location intelligence to understand national and local patterns in health, from providing insight on localised health inequalities to responding to outbreaks at any scale.

As an official exhibitor for the upcoming Healthcare Excellence Through Technology (HETT) conference in September, we caught up with Esri UK to give insight into data within the digital health sector.

HETT: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Tell us a bit about how your organisation currently supports the health and care sector.

Esri UK: Esri UK are the global market leaders in location intelligence and are supporting the health and care sector in making use of location data to provide actionable insights and drive evidence-based decision-making.

We work across the spectrum of health and care, from public health to the NHS, and from National Bodies to Local Authorities. Our work spans across 5 strategic pillars:

Public health & population health insights;
Service and demand planning;
Estates and asset management;
Environment and patient monitoring;
Hospital management and navigation.

Our technology is helping the sector realise true value, whether that is supporting an effective vaccination roll-out and helping reduce vaccine wastage, or enabling targeted actions to reduce health inequalities.

HETT: What are some of the biggest challenges that you have identified when working closely with your NHS/Care partners?

Esri UK: From my experience, the healthcare sector and the NHS have some of the brightest minds and personalities, which is crucial for innovation. However, the size and disparate nature of the sector can be problematic. Interoperable systems and a centralised platform would enable collaborative innovation, bringing together a collection of ideas to formulate more strategically beneficial innovations.

Similarly, data standards can be challenging. Different organisations capturing data in different formats and using different data schemas can make integration and data processing difficult at times. Implementing data strategies that encourage standardisation would enable these disparate datasets to be more easily harmonised.

HETT: Tell us how working with your products and solutions can help tackle some of the challenges that exist within digital health.

Esri UK: The geospatial lens often uncovers insights that were previously undetected. Considering the spatial and temporal components of data and visualising in the context of location as opposed to analysing through dashboards or spreadsheets enables different questions to be asked, for example:

Where are my vulnerable populations?
Where is vaccine uptake low? What is the demographic within the area?
What are the social and economic determinants of health within my locality?
How accessible is healthcare? How long would it take to travel there by foot, car or public transport?
Where do we have limited GPs? Where do we target recruitment? Where do we anticipate GP retirements in 3, 5 and 10 years? Can we mitigate this now?
How is the virus spreading? Where is it most prevalent?
How is energy utilised across my hospital estate and could we reduce our carbon footprint?

These are just some of the questions that our technology can enable the healthcare sector to answer. In answering these questions, the sector will be contributing to the delivery against many of the strategic targets identified within the NHS long-term plan, from reducing health inequalities, reducing the elective backlog, and delivering net zero.

HETT: We will be hosting HETT Connect again this year, enabling speakers to meet with exhibitors on a 1:1 basis. Who are you hoping to meet?

Esri UK: Esri UK are hoping to meet innovators, trail-blazers and people that want to deliver value to the NHS. Anybody that has a mandate or desire to reduce health inequalities, reduce the elective backlog, transform service delivery or deliver net zero, then please do come over for a chat.

HETT: As HETT Show approaches (27-28 Sept @ExCeL London), tell us what you are looking forward to the most at HETT Show 2022.

Esri UK: As always, an opportunity to meet with great people that are achieving truly remarkable things for the good and benefit of our population!

HETT: Thank you for your time today. It’s been a pleasure catching up with you and learning more about how Esri UK contributes to the evolution of the healthcare sector. We look forward to seeing you at HETT Show (27th & 28th September, ExCeL London)!