access to health data. As a provider of online appointments for local dentists, Toothpick was experienced in crunching b
SUPPORTING DATA DRIVEN VENTURES WITH HEALTHY ACCESS
The Digital Catapult has helped Toothpick.com to launch a new online service, providing insight into the relative ease of living a healthy life across England.
Healthy Access is a new online service, launched in February 2015 by Toothpick. com, the market leading dental booking platform in the UK. The project, which uses a variety of healthrelated data to offer a health score for over 300 areas in England, the service makes use of the Digital Catapult’s Open Health Data Platform.
1500 DATA SETS USED 300 BOROUGHS IN ENGLAND SCORED 5 DATA STRANDS MERGED
The project uses a variety of health-related data to offer a health score for over 300 areas in England, the service makes use of the Digital Catapult’s Open Health Data Platform. The Healthy Access score takes into account access to GPs, access to dentists, quality of hospitals, walking and cycling behaviour, and access to green space. The project’s aim is to provide a simple to use platform where local citizens can comment, reflect and influence decision makers in order to make sure that their local area offers the right provisions for them to stay healthy.
The need for better access to health data As a provider of online appointments for local dentists, Toothpick was experienced in crunching big data numbers on access to healthcare services on a local level and had collected a huge amount of data, which they wanted to leverage the commercial potential of. In addition, via access to publicly available data, such as the recent finding that tooth decay is the primary reason why children are admitted to hospital, they had concluded that, by pairing their data with open health data, they could create a powerful tool for the public.
Toothpick were also keen to develop a project focusing on prevention as the key to alleviating the burden on the health service. The rationale being individuals make the right health decisions depending on the right services being available to them. Support from the Digital Catapult The Digital Catapult, through its Open Health Data Platform and the newly opened Digital Catapult Centre, was able to provide Toothpick with access to data scientists who could collate and turn the open data into a manageable dataset. The two organisations worked together over several months to develop the platform and design a scoring system for each local authority in England. In particular, Toothpick was keen to differentiate the scoring system from traditional health indicators such as disease rates and life expectancy, and instead focus on opportunities to be healthy.
Outcome & conclusions Working with the Digital Catapult allowed Toothpick to create an engaging open data application, built on a solid foundation of data analysis – and have it visualised in an engaging and understandable format. It also enabled Toothpick to focus on the project and develop it quickly, without needing to divert resources from core activities, which may have had a negative impact on their business. Following the launch in February, Toothpick are now urging local authorities and like-minded organisations to get involved by becoming content partners and displaying their local scores on their websites by downloading a badge from the Healthy Access website. The project has already received endorsements from Patient.co.uk, NHS Choices, and Drdoctor.com.
TO OT H P I C K H E A LT H Y ACC E S S
Delivering economic value – the next phase Toothpick will now continue to work with content partners who can supply additional data points and added value – notably DrDoctor who will ‘own’ the Hospitals Score. Their hope is that Healthy Access will mature into a trusted platform for feeling the pulse of the state of the nation’s health. In addition, the Digital Catapult will make the designs of the framework available via the Open Health Data Platform for others to use in the future.
© Digital Catapult 2015
Jozef Wallis, cofounder, Toothpick said:
“Working with the Digital Catapult has allowed us to create an engaging open data application, built on solid analysis. We would encourage anyone to take the opportunity to work with them and harness the vast reserves of open data available in the UK”.
Peter Karney, Head of Engineering, Digital Catapult said:
“We are very pleased with the progress of this project so far and are excited to see how it continues to develop. The strength of the Digital Catapult is that we were able to not only understand the data and Toothpick’s core business, but to connect the two and provide them with a user friendly interface which is engaging for the public.”
Region: England
Partners: Toothpick.com, Mastodon C
Challenge area: Personal Data & Trust
Project website: www.toothpick.com/healthy-access
digitalcatapultcentre.org.uk
[email protected]
“We want to empower local organisations to use big data to enforce change – however big or small. We have therefore built in the possibility for anyone to download a badge showing their local Healthy Access Score and there by start the debate in their community”. Jozef Wallis, co-founder of Toothpick
