15 minutes with: Jenny Lewis

Tell me a little bit about your background and what brought you to PA?

I always describe myself as a health data person. I did a PhD in epidemiology and that’s really where I first put healthcare and data together. I haven’t looked back since. The next chunk of my career after academia was working in more product-focused companies, very much around how to get data and information into the healthcare system. I moved into consulting to get really close to the client. That’s what I’ve always enjoyed about consulting – you’re right there in the midst of client challenges. That eventually brought me to PA, and I’ve been here for eight years now.

How would you describe your job to someone who might not be familiar with the intricacies of consulting?

What I do is help the healthcare system to deliver better quality care. I absolutely believe that to get through the current challenges facing our healthcare systems we must be better at using the information that sits within them. We collect huge amounts of data every day. Every single time you go to the doctors, you’ll see them put a load of information into a computer. The same happens when you go to hospital. However, the proportion of this information which is turned into something genuinely useful in helping to run a better healthcare system is still tiny. There’s much to go at here and lots of potential for our healthcare system, in particular the NHS.

What’s different about PA’s approach? What makes PA different?

We’ve always taken a really integrated approach where we bring people who know how to run a hospital and healthcare system together with people like me who know a lot about the data that sits there and what you can do with it. For every project we run, we bring these disciplines together and it’s really powerful.

We’re now moving to a point where we’ve been able to capture enough of the intelligence within data to put it into products and leave those products behind in hospitals. We’re not just a consulting firm, we’re helping organisations to improve all their processes and we’re also providing data products, which are helping them to continue to run themselves better.

What’s changed in the world of healthcare since you first joined PA?

The world of data has absolutely exploded in the last few years. When I first joined, I was knocking down doors to say you really should be using data, because if you did you might find it’s a bit easier to solve problems. This has absolutely flipped around in the last decade – now, if we don’t have data people involved in projects, people are surprised. I’m regularly asked to advise on what people should be doing with their data to address the lack of investment in data and digital technologies in the NHS over the last 10 years or so. It’s been a total reversal of people’s interest, and it’s not going away.

The AI wave we’re now riding is the next phase. We’ve crossed the desert of no-one being interested, and people are now saying, okay, maybe there’s value in this data. Everybody wants to understand how AI can help to transform their organisation. I was talking to the National Conference of Chief Finance Officers recently on exactly this topic – they asked us to come and talk about how AI will transform hospital finance.

How does Patient Catalyst tie into this shift?

Over the last couple of years, we’ve been taking all of the great work we’ve been doing with data, particularly in hospitals, and packaging it up into products to provide an enduring capability within hospitals. As part of that, we’re driving the use of data to fuel intelligent operational decision-making.

For example, with Patient Catalyst, we can take operating theatre data including waiting lists, and which consultants operate on which days, and say which slots are best for booking each patient in for their surgery. Over the last year, leveraging the latest AI technologies, we’ve increased the efficiency of getting patients through theatres by up to 20 percent. As a set of products, Patient Catalyst is totally transforming the way people make decisions about how we use hospital services. We do a similar thing in imaging services. It’s the same problem as operating theatres – long waiting lists, limited numbers of MRI scanners and CT scanners, and lots of wasted slots for appointments. We have algorithms that sit between the waiting list and those slots, and enable teams to work out where best to place patients – both to treat them in the right order and maximise the use of CT and MRI scanners.

Where does ingenuity fit in the work that you do?

We’re genuinely breaking new boundaries here. One of the things I think is really exciting is while we’ve got some brilliant results in improving hospital management, we’re also laying the groundwork for the hospital of the future. If you think about genomic medicine or personalised medicine, when we get sick, we’ll all have a bespoke treatment pathway made just for us based on our particular genetic makeup. That is happening already – there are cancer diagnoses right now where treatment is tailored to individual genomic analysis. One blocker is the complexity of managing bespoke treatment pathways within a hospital environment. Everybody needs to be treated at different times and stages, with different diagnostics along the way. It’s impossible to manage using Excel spreadsheets and clipboards, which is often what hospital staff are using.

What is exciting you most in your area of work right now?

The type of work I do tends to be more on the operational side of things. Improving the experience for both patients and the clinicians caring for them.

To do this we have to simulate all the other patients that arrive in the same period, and how long they stay. That’s a really complicated question that we couldn’t answer 10 years ago when I first started doing simulation models of hospitals. But, in the last couple of years, we’ve done it.

We have digital twins in the hospitals we work with, and they do two things. One, it helps hospitals know when beds will become available, which is really helpful – if you're booking someone in for surgery, for example, you can book them into a bed as well which massively decreases the risk of surgery being cancelled if a bed isn’t available. Second, at the point at which the patient arrives in hospital, we can predict the date when they’ll be ready to leave. That’s incredibly important because at any one time something like one third of hospital beds are full of people who don’t need to be there. They’re ready to be discharged and could be treated somewhere else or be back at home.

What successes are you most proud of, past or current?

The operating theatre example is probably the most recent, where the work we’ve done has genuinely impacted patients’ lives. You know, there are thousands of additional patients who were seen in the hospitals we were working with, because of the work that we did to make sure that we were opening up slots to the right patients at the right time. It’s impossible not to feel incredibly proud of the team. I’m also proud that we’ve got to this point.

It’s been a frustration of mine ever since I became a consultant that there’s a tendency to go to a new hospital you’ve not worked in before and start from scratch with how you help them. I’ve been on a mission to get to the point where we know which data we’re going to need, package it into a product, deploy it, and move much quicker in solving that problem and finding space to innovate. I’m really proud of us for having got to the point of having our AI product Patient Catalyst out there and driving such important benefits for patients. We haven’t solved all of the problems yet – there are plenty more to go after.

If you were speaking to somebody who wanted to get involved in what you do and help to deliver those benefits, what advice would you give them?

The advice I tend to give people is to do the things you enjoy. I’ve had an incredibly rewarding career to date because I worked out that I was most passionate about the intersection between healthcare and data. I could see its importance to the world, and it’s given me such a lot of purpose. I’m almost getting emotional talking about it. It really means a lot to me and has been the driving force of my career. So, my advice is to find the thing that you really, really enjoy and go after it. The world of data is an exciting place, and it’s becoming so much more open to people these days. At one point, you needed a computer science degree. That’s just not the case anymore. At PA, we have a number of schemes that help people to transition into data careers. It’s absolutely brilliant. No-one can deny the importance of data science and AI in our society, and I’m thrilled that we have a role to play in that.

What are your future goals for Patient Catalyst?

There’s no shortage of challenges in terms of where we want to take Patient Catalyst. We’re just scratching the surface of what AI and predictive analytics can do for managing our healthcare system.

I’ve talked about how we could use our tool to help manage personalised pathways. One step is to take a digital twin and, rather than base it on events such as the patient getting admitted to hospital, base it on the whole patient journey right from referral through to diagnostics and treatments. We can now start to build a digital twin based on the entire pathway, which gives us a really rich picture of what’s going on and unlocks our ability to predict in much more granular detail exactly how healthcare services need to run. This could totally transform healthcare services, so we’re really excited. That’s a big stream of what we’re working on at the moment.

The other thing is that data is only ever one component of the solution – there’s also a big people challenge that fits around all of it. I could provide the best data in the world, but if nobody understands why they’re looking at it and what to do with it, what’s the point?

There’s no point in building the world’s most brilliant predictive models if we’re not helping the operational side of the healthcare system to understand, engage, and think differently about how they run. So, that’s another big focus for us over the coming years.

And finally, what are you looking forward to right now?

On a local level, the Patient Catalyst team has grown over the past year. We’ve had fantastic investment from PA to build this product, so I’m looking forward to seeing the team grow and develop the new generation of people who really understand the challenges, are excited by them, and help to tackle them in new and different ways.