Steven Critchlow is executive chair and founder of Evergreen Life .
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In terms of making the biggest difference to health and wellbeing that we can, we’re doing a few things at the moment.
One of them is improving access to GPs.
We have a system where people can fill in a form on their practice website to ask for an appointment.
We find that most people want to use the form because it saves them from having to call in at 8am and wait on the phone for ages.
Instead, they can fill in the form the night before.
From all of that data, we can work with research organisations to see if we can get closer to a diagnosis and understand their needs based on what they’re saying.
Many of the things that people contact a GP for are what we would call admin.
It might be that their prescription has run out and they need a repeat. Well, that doesn’t have to go to a GP. It can be done by admin staff.
So we’re using large language model technology to look at the data so that we can improve things even further.
In dermatology, we collect pictures of people’s moles and we also know the outcome.
So because everybody’s contributing to that research, we’re able to train the system to diagnose whether or not a mole is cancerous based on an image straight from a mobile phone.
I recently had an exciting meeting with NHS England who were asking about how we can save carbon.
Imagine the carbon savings if, instead of going to a clinic, millions of people just sit at home and take a photograph and let a computer tell them whether they need to worry or not.
We’ve saved the journey to the GP which would then become a journey to the hospital and the dermatologist and so on.
We’ve got to the point where we can diagnose a mole, whether it’s cancerous, more accurately than a clinician can.
Where are you expecting to take things in 2024?
We’re working with NHS England on doing a better health check. It started off with which blood tests you take and so on.
We’ve worked out that we can use AI to predict which questions we should ask you to see if your blood pressure is raised, for example.
By choosing five questions based on your age, weight and gender, we can now predict your blood pressure reading more accurately than a doctor could measure it.
The measurement that a doctor takes is less effective at working out whether you’re hypertensive than the questions we ask.
To get here, we needed millions of patients who have connected themselves to the GP record, enabling us to make health checks more efficient.
It must be rewarding for patients to be part of this process.
Absolutely. Just as you can be a kidney donor, why not be a data donor?
If we’re all prepared to let our data contribute to research, we can [help overcome] some of the problems that we’ve got in healthcare, not just in this country but throughout the world.
