Innovating in a crisis: Our COVID Insights Story – Deeper Insights

When the novel coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe and we were stuck hopelessly in our homes while the brave clinicians and key workers put their lives on the line for the sake of us all, we wanted to do our part to help out, and felt that we could do so by trying to make the researchers’ lives easier.

The idea came from a rather panicked phone call in early March with my sister, Dr Sophie Harris, a consultant at Kings College London. She had just been informed that her ward was being taken over for COVID-19 patients and she suddenly had to become an expert in everything to do with the virus. She was immediately overwhelmed by the huge amount of information from multiple sources with no easy way to navigate this evolving landscape of research from across the globe.

Around the same time, the fantastic CORD-19 dataset was published. This was a rich dataset of research on COVID-19, validated by leading institutions in research and medicine, and therefore one I felt we could build upon. When we started there were 28,000 research papers, and now at the time of writing there are 128,000.

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, I came to the realization that Deeper Insights was in a unique position to help navigate this vast sea of information. As experts in analytics and data science, we have the tools and the know-how to build innovative products to tackle big problems.

Like many businesses at the start of lockdown, we’d had about 50% of our projects postponed or cancelled, which on reflection was actually quite helpful as it gave us the spare capacity to knuckle down and focus on the task at hand.

In the space of a week, I’d managed to pull together a consortium of key technology and healthcare industry professionals to help guide the development of the COVID-19 Insights Platform. Amazingly, Matthew Harker, a former BMJ director, and Meuthia Endrojono-Ellis, a former director of the NHS, agreed to provide advisory support, and were invaluable throughout the product development process. Through their network we were also connected to Dr Andrew Jones at Amazon who very generously granted us credits to develop our platform using their Neptune Knowledge Graph.

During the product development process, we interviewed countless clinicians (with a focus on those who were self-isolating rather than taking up the valuable time of frontline doctors) and from our interviews, we deduced that the product should support ongoing research into the virus, rather than clinical decision support which was an initial hypothesis. Speaking to anaesthetists in Italy and Intecivists in Wales, we got a very clear picture of the problems they face: