The Data Malarkey Podcast

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Andrew Cooper, President and Senior Advisor at Yonder Consulting. A research, data, and insights man through and through, Andrew founded the market research company Populus more than 20 years ago, which helped to reinvent the way polling is done in the wake of the 2015 UK General Election.

Andrew ran research and polling and then strategy and political operations for the Conservative Party, either side of the 1997 Labour landslide for more than three years, and served as director of strategy to David Cameron in the Prime Minister's Office for almost three years in the coalition government. Thanks to that service, Andrew became Lord Cooper of Windrush and has sat in the House of Lords for almost the last nine years. Today he splits his time between pollsters Populus, his new venture, Yonder, and the House of Lords.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on Friday 26 May 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Two unexpected topics start this discussion: (i) Andrew and Sam's shared love of ironing (to which Sam adds washing up and mowing the lawn, as activities with a defined endpoint), and (ii) the fact that Andrew now sits as a politically non-affiliated member of the second chamber despite years of working for the Conservative Party. His decision to go independent was thanks to the Tories becoming increasingly hard line – the de facto Brexit Party – in the wake of the 2016 EU Referendum, and "with malice aforethought".

Although he did a degree in economics at the London School of Economics, Andrew stayed away from the mathematical side of the subject. He only fell into working intensively with data when he started working in political polling. As US President Lyndon B. Johnson is said to have said, "The first rule of politics is that you need to be able to add up".

Andrew explains his approach to making sense of political (media, and consumer) intentions and choices by building a geodemographic model that brings together: census data, historical polling data, psychological archetypes from the BBC Great Personality Test, and a growing array of other sources. His Clockface model maps attitudes and behaviours on the two critical dimensions of security and diversity. The model explains the often bitter disagreements evident in politics everywhere and reveals "how Brexit broke the structure of British politics". This reaction to the impact and realities of globalisation has been played out in countries around the world.

The TV programme that best sums up Britain – that appeals to all groups, irrespective of where they fall on the security x diversity axes – no matter whether they voted Remain or Leave in the EU Referendum – is … Love Island. Peep Show and Black Mirror are in Remain heartland, while Mrs Brown's Boys is slap-bang in the middle of Leave's core support.

Andrew unpicks the success of Leave's chief architect, Dominic Cummings, and his "£350m a week to the NHS" trap, contrasting it with Remain's inability to find a credible alternative number with a positive spin that captured the reality of the benefits of Britain's membership of the EU.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Andrew on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewcooperpopulus/

Yonder Consulting and the Clockface – https://yonderconsulting.com/clockface/

Lord Cooper of Windrush – https://members.parliament.uk/member/4327/contact

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles meets Professor Angela Gallop, CBE, the forensic scientists' forensic scientist. Over the past four decades, the teams she's led have solved some of the most complex, difficult, and intransigent cold cases in British criminal history: Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, Roberto Calvi under Blackfriars Bridge, and Damilola Taylor in Peckham. And perhaps most notoriously of all, Stephen Lawrence, stabbed by a gang of racist thugs on the streets of Eltham.

The details of how Angela and her teams cracked these cases – often bringing pioneering new techniques into play – are recorded in (ahem!) forensic detail in all manner of media. They're in Angela's 2019 book When the Dogs Don't Bark, her 2022 book How to Solve a Crime, and in any number of TV documentaries and specials. Most recently, this included the three-part ITV1 series, Cold Case Forensics, in February of this year. Not to mention Angela's appearance on the legend that is BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs last November. Links below.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on Friday 15 September 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Angela tells us how her interest in solving crime was perhaps first kindled by the lurid stories in the now-defunct British tabloid Sunday newspaper, The News of the World, and her love of science was enflamed by an inspirational, sixth-form biology teacher at school "just in the nick of time". This passion for working things out combined with an intense sense of natural justice saw forensic science take over her life after she joined the Home Office Forensic Science Service in 1974.

As her skills developed and as she founded and scaled some of the country's first and most successful private forensic science businesses, Angela became an international expert in blood and other bodily fluids – who they could and couldn't have come from, and the patterns they make and leave behind at crime scenes.

Forensics cover so many different areas in "offences against the person" – bodily fluids, of course, but also weapons, clothing – textiles, fibres, and fragments – toxicology, drugs, footwear, documents, and firearms. Increasingly, criminals leave digital traces of their activity, but the biggest single development in Angela's long and stellar career has been the rise to prominence of DNA evidence.

In perhaps the most memorable, moving, and intricate part of our discussion, Angela details how – after repeated examination and failures to identify the killers – she and her team unpicked the evidence that led to prosecution in the Stephen Lawrence case.

Angela also maintains that real forensics is much more subtle, time-consuming, interesting, and collegiate than the CSI TV drama series are ever able to portray.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Angela's books https://www.waterstones.com/author/professor-angela-gallop/4009171

A 'Long Read' on Angela's career, from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/24/queen-of-crime-solving-angela-gallop-forensic-science

Angela on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs from 4 November 2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dmpl

2023 ITV1 series Cold Case Forensics covering how Angela and her team cracked the Rachel Nickell, Lynette White, and Stephen Lawrence cases https://www.itv.com/watch/cold-case-forensics/10a1535/10a1535a0002

--

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles meets Sabrina Shadie, a multi-award winning ethics and equity change maker; a diversity and inclusion advocate; and, a resilience champion. Sabrina's the founder of the D'Rose Development Consultancy, a company that aims to simplify ethics and equality regulations so that caring business owners can deliver inclusive and sustainable strategies. She's a catalyst for change not only through her own business and the impact it can have on its clients, but also in the networks and associations she creates, from Change the Balance to the Diverse Business Network.

In the often challenging, threatening, and sometimes toxic atmosphere that characterises many public debates today, Sabrina stands out for the calm, informed, evidence-based approach she brings to issues of diversity and inclusion. She doesn't only help organisations build ethical business practices because it's the right thing to do; she helps them understand how embedding positive actions increases productivity, sustainability, and compliance, and is essential to good governance. And to do this, Sabrina is no stranger to identifying powerful and persuasive data and then using that as the underpinning for really persuasive storytelling.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on Monday 15 May 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Sabrina describes herself as having always loved facts, been up for an argument, but only an argument based on evidence; an informed debate. When helping organisations to become more equitable, she's always cautious to ensure they're not just doing it as a tick-box exercise and then moving on. "There's no point being tokenistic," she observes. "That benefits no-one."

At her consultancy, D'Rose, Sabrina uses data to find where an organisation's baseline performance is, to set targets, and to project into the future. In some of the many intersectional debates her work requires businesses to have – be they focused on racism, sexism, or ableism – there often isn't much data on which to build a baseline. In Sabrina's experience, this is particularly true for disability.

When challenging deeply entrenched views – often held of generations and based on little more than irrational prejudice – Sabrina has an awesome and impactful hack that empowers those whose attitudes she's working with to become more equitable. She uses approaches taken from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to actively dismantle and then rebuild those whose identity is based on their misperception of superiority. Now that's genuinely inspired, lateral, and impactful data storytelling.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Sabrina on LinkedIn – where she's very active, particularly on video – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabrina-shadie/

D'Rose Consultancy – https://droseconsultancy.com

Change the Balance CIC – https://www.change-the-balance.org

Diverse Business Network – https://www.diversebusinessnetwork.com

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Les Guessing, a 360-degree creative and marketer. Les is an Emmy Award-winning copywriter, video virtuoso, and self-professed data fool. He describes himself as a creative director "with a passion (some would say 'personality disorder') for using aspects of data, data science, machine learning, and AI … to make advertising creative better and more impactful". On his website is, perhaps, one of the longest and most impressive resumés (CVs to British listeners) ever written, a full, 34-page PDF.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on Good Friday, 7 April 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

After an unsuccessful stint in Hollywood – "I was a wildly unsuccessful screenwriter" he observes with typical humility and wit – Les has 20 years under his belt as a creative director in advertising. His penchant for humour won him fans among the client community and awards from judges. But his past decade has been very unlike many of his peers in the creative and copywriting world. He's steeped himself in AI, data science, natural language processing, and neuro-linguistic programming. An "auto-didact addict", he's become more and more data savvy at just the point that data has become the new oil – the new gold – in marketing communications. And how it's paid off.

An experienced improv performer – so often the hallmark of a generous, lateral, insightful thinker – Les is fascinated by the structure of jokes. His scripts often lead viewers in one direction, only for a switcheroo to confound expectations, cause initial confusion then laughter, and serve to make the ad more memorable as a result. We should expect a book from Les on the structure of many different sorts of jokes in the years ahead.

The race to AI may at last be opening eyes in Madison Avenue, but Les has been fluent in R, SQL, and Python for many years, helping machines to learn underlying truths of a market from big data sets. And then subverting expectations with a joke. His experience with a wide variety of different types of data – particularly large language models and tabular data – has convinced him that copywriters should only ever brainstorm and develop ideas having first steeped themselves in data.

But Les doesn't believe machines have insight – "they just do math over letters" – and it's no surprise to him that ChatGPT struggles with metaphors and puns. "ChatGPT is like a junior copywriter, producing B or C grade content. Useful, but not making star performers redundant. Far from it. They'll be more in demand than ever before." Les sees copywriters and AI tools working together as the modern equivalent of ad guru Bill Bernbach putting copywriters and the art department together in the middle of the 20th century.

How very refreshing!

EXTERNAL LINKS

Les' homepage – https://lesguessing.com

Two of Les' projects - https://zombiedatahunter.com and https://creativealgorithm.org

Les' LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesguessing/

Les on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/lesguessing/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

After our second set of six great guests, it's a wrap for Season Two of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between March and May 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

Tim Jobson, Consultant in Internal Medicine at Somerset Foundation NHS Trust and Medical Director of Predictive Health Intelligence

Sam Michelson, Founder & CEO of Five Bocks – Intelligent Digital Reputation

Elizabeth Press, Creator & Owner of the D3M Labs (Data-Driven Decision-Making) blog

Stijn Gimbrère, MD of Media Futures Market

Jean-Baptiste Bouzige, Founder & CEO of Ekimetrics

Steve Pinker gives a brilliant explanation of the Curse of Knowledge – the difficulty in imagining what it's like not to know something that you know – from its origins in experimental psychology. Digital reputation management expert, Sam Michelson, shows how dangerous the Curse can be in business.

One of the main challenges for using data smarter is that 'data people' speak a different language – and are motivated and remunerated for different reasons – from others in a business or organisation. D3M Labs blogger, Elizabeth Press, details the consequences of failing to address this.

AI is changing how many organisations work, and Ekimetrics' Founder & CEO, Jean-Baptiste Bouzige, is already applying AI tools among his 400-strong army of data scientists. Pinker is more sceptical – about how it works and whether it will solve the world's biggest, thorniest problems.

Using data smarter accelerates performance in every sector, and in this season – and this season wrap-up episode – we also hear from health software pioneer, Tim Jobson, and Stijn Gimbrère, a man on a mission to clean-up the often murky and fraudulent online advertising market.

Data Malarkey is back with Season Three from 27 September, and there's a glittering array of guests from an increasingly diverse set of professions. We'll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of screenwriting, diversity and inclusion, and forensic science; from market research, digital marketing, and AI. Their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Jean-Baptiste Bouzige, the CEO of Ekimetrics. The company describes itself as "a pioneering leader in data science and AI-powered solutions for sustainable business performance". Jean-Baptiste is one of the founders of Ekimetrics, a business he launched in 2006 after starting his career at the ad agency DDB. At DDB he was in charge of developing analytics and modeling methodologies.

Jean-Baptiste is passionate about finding innovative ways to deliver simple insights from complex methods for better decision-making, and Ekimetrics is increasingly focused on helping businesses become sustainable for the long term. He teaches "Data for Marketing" at the HEC business school in Paris on the Executive MBA program. Jean-Baptiste is a graduate of both the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines de Paris, where he specialised in applied mathematics and micro-economics.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 11 April 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Although he spends much of his time managing and building the 400-strong Ekimetrics team of data scientists and engineers, Jean-Baptiste takes most pleasure from writing. His writing focuses on the impact of the data-driven models his team builds to help the company's clients enhance their business decision-making. "Smarter use of data all starts with well-informed, key business questions," he tells me.

Jean-Baptiste believes that the most important encounter data scientists and engineers can have with the data sets they're working with is the very first exploration of raw, unfiltered information. This initial encounter sets the tone for how the data will be used and enables everyone in a business to start speaking the same language. For Jean-Baptiste, the failure to find a common lexicon across different functions is one of the main reasons why data doesn't solve the problems it can.

Ekimetrics brings together algorithms and data, technology and core business functions with the single-minded goal of securing competitive advantage. The company aims to deliver transformational impact and invests its time here rather than in piecemeal, micro-optimisations. This is particularly important for legacy businesses which are forced to evolve because of societal change, consumer pressure, and legislation; businesses including automotive and consumer goods. Hence Ekimetrics' current and future focus on sustainability.

The rapid evolution of powerful AI engines which are widely-available at no or low cost – engines such as ChatGPT – excites Jean-Baptiste, provided they're used at the right time and in the right way. He agrees with Bill Gates that AI is the most important innovation in business in the past 35 years.

We end our conversation talking about Jean-Baptiste's 2022 interview with his hero, the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman (link below). He was so impressed with Kahneman's thoughtful, considered response to his questions, as if considering them for the first time.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Ekimetrics website – https://ekimetrics.com

Jean-Baptiste's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jean-baptiste-bouzige-6aaa242/

Jean-Baptiste interviewing Daniel Kahneman – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMLujEsoxoM

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

It's fair to say that one of the markets that has become most complex and least transparent in the digital age has been advertising. The market was described in 2016 by Marc Pritchard – the Chief Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble, both the world's biggest consumer goods business and the world's highest-spending advertiser – as "murky at best, fraudulent at worst".

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Dutch media entrepreneur Stijn Gimbrère, Founder and CEO of Media Futures Market. Media Futures Market is an innovative platform that directly connects buyers – that's brands and their agencies – with high-quality media owners and publishers selling advertising inventory. In a market that's been weighted for too long against advertisers – whose budgets fund every link in the chain – Media Futures Market's mission is to provide buyers and sellers with the same information; simply, clearly, and transparently .

Before founding his current venture in June 2020, Stijn cut his teeth at the Dutch media network, RTL Nederland, before holding a variety of strategy and corporate development roles at advertising platform SpotX. he identified the gap in the market for his new venture while on a round-the-world trip with his wife, just pre-pandemic.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 4 April 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

For too long, middlemen who only erode value have squandered advertisers' marketing budgets. Stijn is driven by a desire to bring transparency to the advertising market. One of the ways Media Futures Market does this is by enabling buyers to "compare apples with apples" and understand what an investment on one media property will deliver compared with any other.

Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Alphabet (Google, YouTube) make it easy – though not totally transparent – for buyers to know what they're buying. By making it easy, they account for up to 80% of the online ad market. But there's huge value in other properties and platforms, and Media Futures Market makes it straightforward for buyers to know where the value is for them.

As a data storyteller, Stijn appreciates the need to "read the room" and understand the likely data tolerance of those you're speaking to. You need a different type of narrative – and a different blend of narrative and numbers – if you're talking to a CEO compared with a Finance Director. Knowing your audience is, for Stijn, a critical dimension of being a better data storyteller.

Media Futures Market first attracted media attention – from the Dutch equivalent of the Financial Times – by telling a data-driven story which showed the numbers in the advertising market don't add up; that demonstrated the poor value many buyers were getting. This was particularly true of the unregulated, automated, programmatic advertising market. That – Stijn says – was the Wild West. Thanks in no small part to businesses committed to transparency and information symmetry like Stijn's Media Futures Market, the days of the Wild West are rapidly becoming history.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Media Futures Market – https://mediafuturesmarket.com/en/

Stijn's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijn-gimbrère-830b852a/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Elizabeth Press, the creator and owner of D3M Labs – "the Data-Driven Decision Making Blog". Elizabeth is an experienced data leader, having held data and business intelligence leadership roles with a variety of different businesses in Europe, particularly Berlin, including more than five years with Dell and the same period running her own consultancy. Originally a journalist, it's to these roots that she's recently returned with the Data-Driven Decision Making blog.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 4 April 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In our discussion, Elizabeth paints a bleak picture of the state of data leadership and data usage within most businesses today.

In part this is the result of "data people" and the rest of the business failing to speak the same language and – as a consequence – failing to understand what each other does and how they can be useful to one-another. Businesses fail to treat data as an asset, and data people are often unable to demonstrate quite what an asset it can be. Elizabeth puts this down to a 'human centricity problem'.

In part, it's the result of the hyper-technical focus of data teams, looking to solve technical and data problems before business problems. Any amount of ad hoc coding, making elegant data pipelines, and subscribing to yet another platform or dashboard is unlikely to solve any real business problem.

And in part it's the result of the siloed nature of businesses and a failure of leadership to invest in the planning tools and structures necessary to make data more useable by and useful to businesses.

"Genius doesn't scale," observes Elizabeth. "But neither should management treat the data team as a concierge service." Without the application of empathy, techniques such as Design Thinking, and listening to the voice of the customer, she's not optimistic many organisations will be able to successfully bridge this divide. And there are responsibilities to address this on both sides.

Sam draws two analogies – that great academics don't necessarily make great administrators, however close they may be to a Nobel Prize or being the most widely-respected individual in their field; and, data visualisation is a great skill, but working out the story has to come before any application of Tableau, PowerBI, or any other graphical software. In the same way, the best programmers don't necessarily make the best data leaders.

Elizabeth concludes by focusing our attention on the unintended consequences of the "banality of evil"; of factoring in religion, gender, sexuality into algorithms and those factors being used to deny groups access to healthcare, finance, or housing. Sam compares this with the Chinese Citizen Score, parallels of which are being built into code serving (and categorising) citizens right across the world.

EXTERNAL LINKS

D3M Labs blog – https://d3mlabs.de

Elizabeth's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethpress/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Sam Michelson, Founder & CEO of Five Blocks – a technology and a consulting firm specialising in digital reputation management. He and his team of more than 50 truly do make smarter use of data to understand what the world says and thinks about companies, brands, and corporate executives – and if their opinions really matter or are just froth, bluster, and noise. The company is based in both Jerusalem, Israel, and New York City.

A psychology graduate from Yeshiva University, New York, Sam is also a Master of Science in Management from Boston University. He founded Five Blocks in 2009, and says that the company uses "proprietary technology and big data analysis … to empower top brands and prominent individuals to tell their best story, via search, to the audiences that matter most".

Sam believes it's very easy for corporations and their leaders to get very hung up on signals and content online that don't matter. His company collects time series data from Google (and Bing) search results in dozens of markets all round the world, covering more than 100,000 companies. It also collects Wikipedia data, not least because Wikipedia searches often rank so highly in natural search, plus also – recently – Bing AI, ChatGPT, and Google's Bard. The data is ingested into Five Blocks' proprietary IMPACT tool which gives search data proper context, comparing ongoing results with those from peers and what's normal, what's exceptional, and what's volatile.

Five Blocks' clients tend to engage with the company when there's an opportunity or a threat. Sam and his team don't have data quality challenges so much as data over-abundance issues. They're like "kids in a candy store", he notes. But it's the firm's data-driven approach that takes the emotion out of digital reputation management.

Because the business was boot-strapped and not venture-backed, this has given Five Blocks the opportunity to test and learn and move more slowly than it might otherwise have been forced to. It also started early (2009) and benefits from having no team members with a big consultancy background – though unusually in this market, Five Blocks is both a technology AND a consultancy business.

When looking for insight, Sam is an advocate of mapping out the current situation, identifying what you'd expect to see, and then zeroing in on what's missing. Like a great forensic scientist, he's as keen to explore "when the dogs don't bark" – as the forensic scientist of her generation, Professor Angela Gallop put it in the title of her 2019 book – as when they do.

Sam finds distraction, centres himself, and finds time for reflection away from Five Blocks through his eight (yes, eight) children – not all of whom are still at home – a daily prayer service, and mountain biking in the countryside outside Jerusalem.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Five Blocks – https://www.fiveblocks.com

Sam's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sammichelson/

Five Blocks on Twitter – https://twitter.com/5blocks

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Tim Jobson, a consultant gastroenterologist at the Somerset NHS Foundation Trust in South West England. Tim truly is a product of Oxbridge, having studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge for three years and then Medicine at Oxford for a further three. He went on to take a PhD in Medicine from Nottingham University, and he is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Tim is an expert in what's sometimes rather unglamorously known as "internal medicine", and one of his specialist organs is the liver. Since 2021, he's been the Medical Director and Chief Investigator of a pioneering, data-driven business called Predictive Health Intelligence which is taking a fresh approach to analysing historical blood test data and identifying patients at risk of liver disease.

As he considers the role that data plays in diagnosis of different chronic and acute medical conditions and diseases, Tim zooms in from the stories patients tell their doctors to the results of specific tests and biopsies. By accumulating relevant evidence, healthcare professionals can identify the relative risk or probability that a particular patient is suffering from a particular disease.

We focus on metabolic syndrome – the cluster of conditions that result from the excess of modern life: cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. When we take in more fruit sugar – fructose – than we need, our liver store this as fat. This was fine as recently as 10,000 years ago, before agricultural, industrial, and consumer revolutions, when our ancestors lived a life of feast and famine. But when fatty, salty, sugary foods – particularly those laden with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) – are so readily available, piled high and sold cheap in supermarkets, this sets us up for metabolic syndrome. Something that at least a third of the Western world suffers from today.

One major and silent killer in this cluster of conditions is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. As the clinical lead in a partnership with his local National Health Service Trust and healthcare IT experts, Tim and his colleagues at Predictive Health Intelligence have developed and are rolling-out a case-finding search engine (HepatoSIGHT) which uses the results from historical blood tests taken over a patient's life to predict whether – without them knowing it – they are suffering from this silent killer.

The annual toll of this disease is eye-watering: it costs £7-13bn a year, causes 30,000 premature deaths, and robs the UK population of more than 100,000 years of healthy life each year. We discuss how HepatoSIGHT could dramatically reduce these numbers and how the same, super-smart approach to using existing health data could help identify other, costly, silent killers, too.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Predictive Health Intelligence – https://predictivehealthintelligence.co.uk

Tim Jobson's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-jobson-0043934b/

PHI on Twitter – https://twitter.com/phi_comms

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.