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+ Interesting Projects
+ After 17 years working on research and development of knee replacement devices, my redundancy from DePuy in September 2023 has provided me with the opportunity to consider my future career in healthcare technology. Over recent months I have had many great conversations, some with people I have known most or all of my life, and others with people I have only just met. These conversations have highlighted the importance of considering not only what I do for work, but why I do it. As we move into this period where Data & DHT will have significant societal impact, training is readily available to learn the new skills I need to support what work I do. However, learning about why I do that work is more of a personal exploration. This page is part of that personal exploration, and contains a collection of thoughs, ideas and potential projects that I feel I would highly motived to do, and interesting to work on.
+If any of this interested you enough to get in touch please reach out through LinkedIn.
+resources
+There was a lot of useful learning from #ldf2023 that might help with this, especially the hack at Aire Innovates.
+
+- SNOMED
+- FHIR UK Core
+- https://simplifier.net/HL7FHIRUKCoreR4/~guides
+- https://simplifier.net/guide/uk-core-implementation-guide?version=current
+
+There were also some groups using Open resources. I really like this approach and there are many advantages to working in the open wherever possible [citation needed!]. While I'm not working for any particular organisation, it is a great opportunity for me to expore the 'Open' sector and gives me some real material to work with:
+
+Digitisation of patient monitoring
+Digitisation of health data is beneficial for individuals (they get better treatment) and the population (improved health and effiencies), and is a stated aim of the NHS long-term plan. While implementing new technology (e.g. connecting patient monitoring to wifi) is an obvious step for this, there is as significant estate of un-connected devices in use (e.g. 220,000 BP monitors distributed to peoples homes in 2020). The aim of this project would be to bridge the transition to connected monitoring, but providing tools to digitise that data.
+However, both these tools require accurate human transposition of the data.
+aims:
+create an app to capture BP reading from a patient monitor (home, primary or secondary care) using vision and push this directly to an EHR?
+benefits:
+
+- reduce transposition errors
+- increase uptake of home monitoring
+- enable digitisation of data from existing estate (est. as hundreds-of-thousands) of un-connected monitors already in hospitals, clinics and peoples homes...
+
+feasibility:
+
+- In 2021 a paper was published that demonstrated proof of concept that smartphone technolgy can be used to automate this transposition (the code available via the BPimageTranscribe github repo).
+- Florence (or Flo) is text message based system for home blood pressure reporting (Ian McNicoll also told me about this), and there has been a specific NHS initiative on Home monitoring of blood pressure(BP) Does this flow directly to an EHR, or could a workflow be created to do so?
+- the NHS App has the facility for home reporting of BP, but it is burried extremely deep. How can the usability of this be improved for increased uptake?
+note: BP also forms part of the news2 parameters. Could these be usefully put into an app? Some of these are subjective, so digitising their definition might be useful. It'd take significant validation though.
+
+the under-treated
+
+ further background reading
+
+
+While the clinical practice of medicine is focused on aliviating the symptoms of acutely or chronically unwell patients, healthcare research and development aims to enable clinicians to treat more patients. Often, we thing of this as using new knowledge or technology to diagnose or treat a cohort of patients with a specific condition who are currently un-treatable. However, there are other (large?) cohorts of patients who are not able to access established standard-of-care treatment, and are therefore under-treated. Each of these groups of patients are important, but the focus of this invetigation is to explore the role of Data and Digital Health Technology (DHT) in understanding and addressing the the under-treated.
+Further to this, we might also consider that the 'Healthcare' sector (and spending) is largely focused on treating illness rather than maintaining health (indeed, we might consider that in the UK we actually have a 'National Illness Service'!). However, there are large number of patients suffering from diseases which could be treated (or prevented) through lifestyle changes. So called "lifestyle medicine" has clear benefits to patients, and reduces the burden on healthcare system, and so these types of treatments or interventions are also be to explored here.
+what to treat
+There is an NHS initiative called "Core20PLUS5" which describes "an approach to reducing healthcare inequalities".
+
+- Core20 - The most deprived 20% of the national population
+- PLUS population groups should be identified at a local level (ACTION: what are local to West Yorkshire ICB?)
+- There are five clinical areas of focus which require accelerated improvement
+
+- Maternity
+- Severe mental illness (SMI)
+- Chronic respiratory disease
+- Early cancer diagnosis
+- Hypertension case-finding and optimal management and lipid optimal management
+
+
+
+who/where to treat
+In the past, healthcare has been (unintentionaly?) focused on a privileged minority. By collating and analysing healthcare data with modern tools and techniques, it is now clear that not only are there significant health inequalities in our society, but who (and where) those undersevered population are. The sad but unsurprising fact is that these may be the same populations that have suffered other inequalities through deliberate discrimination such as racism, sexisim or class discrimation. Natural Justice dictates that we now use health inequality data to prioritise activities in areas of high health inequality.
+Helath inequality data sources
+On 4th October 2023 I joined a part of "ONS Local presents: Health Inequalities Explorer Tool webinar". This introduced a series of tools for makring helath inequalities. Slides were also provided on e-mail.
+
+ACTION: Review this for local data to West Yorkhire ICB/NOE
+note: also consider if these areas are also areas of digital inequality/poverty...
+what to do
+Lifestyle Medicine
+see the british society of lifesytle medicine
+social engineering through social media/advertising?
+Joint replacement
+since this is where my background, and that of many of my contact is, it is natural to look at this field. As of October 2023 I've not conducted a formal review, but here are a couple of interesting 'quick finds':
+
+how to fund it
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+ |
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+ career |
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+ resume |
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+ projects |
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+ events |
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+ interests |
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+ reading |
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+ coding |
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+ Resume
+ This is not intended as a CV, but a place where I can collect a full resume of experiences which I can pick from an taylor for specific roles. In particular I am working on CAR stories. If you're here and reading it I hope you find it interesting, but please also see my LinkedIn and contact me there if you'd like to talk about work opportunities.
+note: I had this saved as a document, but that wasn't very accessible to me, and as I'm trying to 'put everything on the web' as open innovations reccomend, here it is!
+
+| EMPLOYMENT HISTORY | EDUCATION | MEMBERSHIPS | TRAINING | RESAERCH | PATENTS |
+EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
+2017/04/01-2023/09/08: Principal Product Development (Bio)engineer
+DePuy Synthes (a Johnson & Johnson Company), Leeds, UK
+As an established technical leader, I had technical oversight for the partial knee segment of this global orthopaedic business. I held discussions with surgeon customers, and senior business leaders to identify alignment between unmet clinical needs and business opportunities. I lead a cross-functional development team in successful delivery of novel surgical instruments for partial knee replacement. I also provided clinical expertise for teams developing software for Robotic Surgery, and Digital Health Technology products.
+I supported a Senior Director in definition of scope for the businesses approach to data science in research and development. I was the Industrial Lead for external research collaborations, leading to deployment of new computational tools for accelerated evaluation of device performance. I supported teams in innovation and problem-solving challenges and individuals in their personal development. I also participated in Diversity and Inclusion initiatives, undertaking training in Unconscious Bias and Mental Health Awareness.
+Remote labs during COVID
+Challenge: In order to progress development projects during COVID, it was necessary to undertaking simulated use labs for surgeons across the world. Travel restrictions prevented the UK based team from travelling so an alternative approach was required.
+Action:
+
+- Lead the team in identifying facilities local to the surgeons with audio-visual facilites, and employees who could attend those facilities without travel.
+- Worked with leadership to gain approval for the events (including employee time), and liased with the surgeons to agree their attendance.
+- Directed suitable training for the attendees.
+- Lead the events remotely through AV connections.
+
+Skills: Leadership, problem solving, networking, communication, influencing
+Result:
+Simulated use labs were sucessfully completed on several occassions, with extremely positive feedback from surgeons and leadership.
+The impact of travel restrictions on the project was mitigated.
+Reflection: These events were made possible due to the collaborative culture of the global organisation. My key contribution was in providing the vision and leadership that the events were possible, and facilitating their sucessful execution by advocating with leadership to meet the needs of the team in doing so.
+Meeting Diverse User Needs: Unicompartmental Knee Replacement Instruments
+CHALLENGE: Through technical analysis of the current market offering a diverse user specification was developed and used to ensure that a representative Surgeon Design Team (SDT) was engaged to provide input to the development project. During formative usability assessments it became clear that two opposing surgical philosophies were in use, and that developing a solution to meet the needs of both user groups could not be achieved within the initial project scope.
+ACTION: By clearly defining these diverse user needs to senior business leadership a change in project scope was agreed, allowing additional resource and effort to be assigned to the project.
+RESULT: This enabled a novel design solution to be developed, which was validated as meeting all user needs. This design is expected to provide a competitive advantage, and has patent protection pending.
+REFLECTION UCD
+External Research Budget Management
+Challenge:
+Action:
+Skills:
+Result:
+Reflection:
+Tech demonstration of Velys RAS(tm) to senior non-technical stakeholders
+Challenge: Including Tim Briggs as part of GIRFT
+Developing Data-strategy for non-tech RnD teams
+Challenge: advocating for role of data in medical device RnD
+Action: sought and completed training
+Skills:
+Result:
+Reflection:
+Technical pressenations to non-technical clinical stakeholders
+2013/08/01-2017/04/01: Staff Bioengineer
+DePuy Synthes (a Johnson & Johnson Company), Leeds, UK
+Leadership for development of surgical instruments and joint replacement implants though design, testing and manufacture. Global product launch activities including presentations in UK, Italy, South Africa and Japan. Responsible for strategy and execution of external research collaborations.
+
+Building trust with remote leadership (FOG)
+Technical discussions with clinical stakeholders (ATTUNE)
+2009/09/01-2013/08/01: Senior Bioengineer
+DePuy Synthes (a Johnson & Johnson Company), Leeds, UK
+Development of surgical instruments and implants for knee replacement. Launch of Sigma(tm) CR150 knee system, including presentations in Thailand and India.
+2008/03/31 -2009/09/01: Bioengineer
+DePuy Synthes (a Johnson & Johnson Company), Leeds, UK
+2006/06/01-2008/03/01: New Product Development Engineer
+Biomet UK Ltd, Swindon, UK
+Research and development of Knee Replacement Implants and Instruments, including drafting of reports and documentation under the regulatory Quality Management System. Working with cross-functional teams in the UK, USA, Japan and China as well as academic partners.
+
+- Vanguard(tm) instruments
+- Vangaurd Porous+HA femur
+
+2000-2001: Student Technician, EBME
+Seimens Healthcare Services, Barnet General Hospital, Barnet, UK
+12 month placement working for PFI provider in a large NHS hospital. Repair and preventative maintenance of medical equipment in a clinical setting, working under an ISO9001 quality system. As well as gaining experience of the workplace and technical tasks, this was an invaluable exposure to working in a clinical setting within the NHS.
+EDUCATION
+
+University of Nottingham, UK
+Application of computational and experimental modelling to investigate mechanisms for infant brain injury. Computational modelling was conducted using MSC Adams and automated using Perl. Experimental data were analysed by developing motion tracking software in C++.
+1998-2002: BEng (hons) in Medical Engineering (thick sandwich course)
+University of Bradford, UK
+Medical application of mechanical engineering. Final-year project on external fracture fixation frames.
+PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
+
+- AMIMechE - CEng interview is booked for Novemebr 2023 and I have been advised that I should be able to convert this to FEng without too much difficulty
+- ORS - Established Member with a number of pressentations
+
+TRAINING
+
+- Fundamentals of Data Science (non-technical), University of Southampton (May 2022)
+- Internal Auditor: ISO13485, BSi (July 2010)
+- Human Elements in Project Success I, Praxis Learning Networks (June 2010)
+- Project Management Essentials, Praxis Learning Networks (May 2010)
+
+RESEARCH
+Research Gate
+Grants
+
+- [Health Holland PPP Allowance Grant: Fixation of total knee replacement implants, UMC st Radboud, Nijmegen, NL] (https://www.health-holland.com/project/2021/2021/fixation-total-knee-replacement-implants)
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+PATENTS
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