Anne set out to develop OWise – a patient-centred app that was co-designed with users from the beginning. This involved holding focus groups across Scotland to understand patient needs and demographics in order to identify how to support them with a digital app.

With input from patients and clinicians, the OWise prostate cancer app now includes features such as personalised medical information, side-effect and symptom tracking tools to monitor wellbeing and to nudge people when their health deteriorates, and a sharing function activated by patients to share their real-time data with clinicians directly via the hospital IT system.

Nesta is working with OWise through the Healthier Lives Data Fund, a partnership between Nesta and the Scottish Government that supports projects in Scotland that show what can be achieved when data is used to give control back to the individual. The six projects on this programme are developing and showcasing the potential of a new generation of data-driven, people-centred digital technology.

Data has become one of the most important resources in modern healthcare. The collection, sharing and analysing of data can help identify disease earlier, has influenced cancer pathways, and has transformed the patient experience in everything from asthma to diabetes. With 90 per cent of the NHS budget still spent on treatment and care, at Nesta we believe that better use of data could enable and support a shift to prevention and early intervention, and help the system provide better joined up and personalised care.

Although the potential for the use of data within health could be huge, there are many concerns, for example around consent, security, trust and fairness that mean this is not a straightforward progression. As the amount of complex and personal data collected about us grows (including genomic and biometric data), so does the need for proper governance to be in place as well as extensive engagement with the public.

It is therefore vitally important to not only ensure that the ecosystem is trustworthy, but to build public trust and understanding about how data is used, both at an individual and population health level–- now and in the future. That’s why we’ve launched another project called Data Dialogues in Scotland. This project will build a relationship with the Scottish public about the balance of trust and value in sharing health data, so we can develop a deeper understanding of citizens’ opinions and ideas.

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