Maddy Phipps-Taylor - data driven
Ex-Downing Street health advisor plans to transform GP records - but warns on privacy
Maddy Phipps-Taylor has a little mission - she wants to build the future of medical records. That sounds ambitious but her career so far shows she shouldn’t be counted out.
Four years after leaving Oxford with a first in engineering, economics and management she was in Downing Street advising Prime Minister David Cameron on health policy. Then after a spell as a Harkness Fellow researching aspects of the American health industry, and four years running strategy for a medical software company, in 2020 she was made CEO of Eva Health Technologies, a startup with a focus on information systems for GPs.
In the latest of my Healthy Conversations, Maddy tells me how Eva has quickly won customers for a system to record Covid and flu vaccinations but plans eventually to create software allowing GPs and patients to record and share any data that is not collected in hospital: “So your primary care records, your community care records, and anything that you want to store on your record in the future.”
A few headlines from our chat:
In Downing Street, the tainted blood scandal taught her about the importance of data and of storing it carefully over many years..
There’s going to be a “seismic shift” in the quantity of medical data and current systems will struggle to cope
She’s cautious about the stalled plan to share GP records - I think we need to build trust with people before they share their data.”
She calls for a guarantee that GP health records would not be available to an insurer.
You can listen to the whole interview here:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1919307/9914087
Maddy Phipps-Taylor says her two years in Downing Street from 2012 to 2014 were formative: ‘It's fascinating, I learned an awful lot about a very thin layer of health health policy that you have to cover when you're doing it at that very senior level. ..the sorts of issues that are raised to the Prime Minister's level go from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
But she says some long-running issues, like the contaminated blood scandal dating back to the 1980s when up to 30,000 haemophiliacs were given blood infected with HIV and hepatitis, made her think about the importance of medical data:
“How is it stored? How is it kept? The legacy of some of those decisions, obviously before electronic medical records existed, is still being felt today. And I think , that does ground you in some purpose of why you've got to capture this data and do a really good job of keeping it, analysing it and drawing a sense of meaning from it.”
Appointed CEO of Eva in the summer of the pandemic in 2020, she soon set about confronting a data challenge - how to record the millions of vaccinations that were going to start rolling out from the end of that year..
She’d been recruited by Public, a fast growing business offering technology for public services. It had created Eva after buying Microtest, a small family-owned medical records business based in Cornwall.
The new CEO took a look at Microtest’s software - and decided to start again: “Essentially, we acknowledged that the legacy code was too legacy.” Instead, Eva was to be a cloud business from the start, based on Amazon Web Services. “I think that's something that as health tech businesses, we don't often acknowledge until it's blatantly too late. And it's quite a bold thing to do to say, actually, you know what, this isn't good enough to sell to the market today.”
I wondered why Public had bought Microtest, only to scrap its system but Maddy insisted that it was the skills of its team which had proved vital. She’s proud of how rapidly that team swung into action to create its vaccine records platform: “We started coding on December 29 2020. And we were within six months assured for use in the NHS, and being used by a pilot site paid for by NHS England. Within the next six months, we went from one customer to 57 customers.”
To be clear, even in the market for vaccine record systems Eva is still a small player, taking on much bigger organisations. But Maddy Phipps-Taylor now wants the company to address the wider challenge of organising the flood of data flowing through primary care: “We are capturing a huge amount of data, I think we all realised we've got far more data than we know how to process, certainly as humans.”
That means that the whole data ecosystem in primary care has to be revamped: “The underlying systems have to be fast - you're only as fast as your slowest link - and you want to think about how do I do really clever things with it in the future. The new wave of health tech is all about using the benefits that other sectors have already benefited from, and being able to bring that into the healthcare context safely.”
This week I wrote about one huge data project, the GP Data for Planning and Research programme, which isn’t moving at all fast. But here Maddy Phipps-Taylor sees a case for proceeding slowly. “I think we need to build trust with people before they share their data.” And one thing she says is vital to building that trust is a guarantee that medical records will never fall into the hands of insurers: “That's something that I think needs to be very clearly articulated as a line that will not be crossed.”
But on the positive side she would like to see patients given a narrative of how their data will be used for good, with a follow up later detailing the advances in healthcare that have resulted from the sharing of their records.
Maddy Phipps-Taylor points to the Zoe Covid Study app created by King’s College London as an example of a health data project which has successfully engaged the public. She says the challenge over the next five years will be tackling the sheer volume of health data and finding ways to see the signal in that noise. And she makes it clear that she and Eva intend to play a big role in tackling that challenge.