As a seasoned healthcare entrepreneur and medical practitioner, Dr. Mark Lomax has created and built some game-changing and disruptive innovations in the field of medicine. His commitment towards creating the best for his patients, coupled with his passion for entrepreneurship has helped him carve a niche in the industry. As the CEO of PEP Health, a platform that uses actual patient insights to identify best practice in healthcare, Dr. Mark has been able to deliver an experience tracker of patients that is proven, fast, accurate and detailed.

Excerpts from an interview with Dr. Mark Lomax:

The rise of PEP Health

PEP Health aims to solve several fundamental problems within the healthcare system, including the need for a better way to listen to patients as survey response rates drop and instead listening to where patients are already talking. As a novel technology that collects, collates, and scores millions of patient comments, PEP Health uses AI to create actionable insights in real-time for hospitals, payors, and patients to better understand the existing standards within the health industry. Free text comments have always been the hardest to codify and make sense of, and now it is possible to accurately and usefully do this.

PEP Health, as a digital and social media listening tool, offers a radical new approach to collecting and analyzing the views of patients on the health services they have received. This offers, comprehensive real-time reporting of what patients really think about their care. ‘’Our platform automatically identifies and gathers millions of items of publicly-available feedback from a variety of online platforms including social media. PEP’s custom algorithms categorize and score the feedback providing a proven, accurate and unbiased summary of what patients really think. People have been wanting this since a long time, and no one has been able to provide this real time experience.”

Pandemic’s Effect on Healthcare Technology:

Noting that Covid has certainly reinvigorated the power of technology within healthcare, Dr. Mark hopes that the same trend continues even after Covid.

Innovation within Healthcare Technology

The importance of innovation has never been clearer than today, states Dr. Mark. “With the recent massive challenges in healthcare without innovation we would be unable to adapt, change and find a solution through a problem such as Covid. More widely, there is still massive potential for technology, but we still have too much hype in the system, and we need more evidence to show its wider benefits to help the more cautious and slow adopters come along on the journey.” He underlines the need for the front runners of health tech innovation to build the trust and credibility and the need for the wider market to accelerate this process.” Noting that patients are increasingly sophisticated consumers within healthcare, Dr. Mark observes that it is essential that organizations and providers listen and understand what patients really think about their care.

Challenges Galore

Dr. Mark observes that with a huge number of innovations and options across the market, patients are confused. “Clinicians and healthcare managers need to improve our wider interoperability ability.” With a focus on AI technologies there are two challenges to flag, he elaborates, “Firstly, data sets are often fragmented, messy and hard to access. Secondly, it is important that these innovations are created and used in an ethical and responsible manner and are described in plain English for everyone to be able to understand how they work and what they do.’’ Finally, reimbursement models need modification to reflect the benefits new technologies can bring, Mark notes.

Most Memorable Moments of Success

Recipient of four national awards within the first year of launch, PEP Health has won hordes of other awards too including: NHS Innovation Accelerator- for best innovations that can help the NHS and Best early-stage technology in the UK- $1,000,000 funding gained from Innovate UK. “Any contract win in the early days is an incredible feeling and should be enjoyed and celebrated” signs off Dr. Mark.