More than 3,000 digital experts and health care innovators from across the health system including NHS Trusts, Foundation Trusts, CCGs, national bodies and private hospitals met at the conference this week.

As part of a panel session at the two-day event, Tom Binstead, director of strategy and analytics at Dr Foster said opportunities to transform healthcare lay in gathering good data and linking it in a way that ensured care could be designed around the individual patient. He added that better engagement in these processes was needed in some trusts, with some people believing population health analysis was solely for commissioners rather than being the responsibility of all organisations involved in health care and prevention.

Dr Foster analyses linked data sets to identify the unique needs of different communities, focusing on machine learning and clustering techniques to spot patterns that might go unnoticed when relying solely on human interpretation of results.

As well as having the right information, the data needs to be accurately interpreted to reveal any trends in the way people are accessing healthcare, allowing health leaders to provide targeted care and prevention.

Dr Foster works with NHS organisations to upskill their staff, using bespoke data visualisation to help health system leaders understand what the data is telling them. You can find out more information about our population health services here.