What is Business Intelligence all about?

Andi OrlowskiAs part of our day in a life series exploring the different team roles here at ICHP, Head of Business Intelligence, Andi Orlowski shares his day with us.

I first open my eyes…
I wake up at 6.00 and as I have 2 young children (5 and 3) there is a lot of activity (often rescue services and/or ballet based) before I leave the house. As I only live 20 minutes from the office I can jump on the bus and I often get in around 7.15. The bus trip is balanced between a quick look at the news vs. managing my virtual chicken farm and playing other games on my phone!

I’m responsible for…
I work in the Business Intelligence (BI) team so a large part of our work is reacting to the needs of our health partners (CCGs, providers, NWL STP) which comes to us through our amazing Innovation Delivery Leads here at ICHP. We help provide support on analytics (including using predictive analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), population health, visualisation and health service evaluations. Our goal is provide additional capability and capacity to the NHS and this leads us to work on some particularly diverse projects such as the National Population Health Analytics Dashboard for Matthew Swindells, Ming Tang and the Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) in partnership with NEL CSU and Cerner to evaluating a predictive risk stratification model powered by an AI.

My path took me…
I spent a significant part of my working life working in pharmaceuticals sales, marketing and market access but found this rather dull and unfulfilling, but it did allow me to partner with the NHS on a number of projects and these were far more challenging and rewarding. I managed to juggle both consulting to the NHS and industry for a few years but ended up spending more and more time working with the public sector until I stopped ‘hedging my bets’ to join Imperial College Health Partners.

My daily calendars reminders look like…
As a large proportion of the work is done in partnership with ICHP providing data, insight and advice so therefore a big proportion of my day is spent with our partners, most often meeting face to face, but sometimes on the phone, to discuss the project at hand. This can mean talking to a small start up company or individuals about new widgets, aiding understanding of market size and what value they could add; through to talking about our methodological approaches to process mapping analyses with French Universities on a collaborative project. Most often we are working with clinicians and health economy leaders on the impact of interventions and helping people understand their populations health. The BI team have a really diverse background and skill set so we also try to meet to discuss different approaches and alternate solutions to our projects.

My most memorable work moment…
I have been lucky enough to work on many of the great projects but one of the most interesting has been working with the always awesome Kenny Ajay, the National Patient Safety Collaborative’s Kate Cheema, Matt Inada-Kim and Geraint Lewis on the bow-tie analysis for sepsis.

My biggest groan about my job is…
The only groan is needing more hours in the day! Working in the very busy BI team and NHS England, having 2 young children, finishing my masters and starting my PhD means life is hectic… It would be great to have more time to spend on our projects. Luckily having the exceptional Julia Wilkins, Wayne Smith, Dhivya Subramaniam, Ibrahim Somalya, Mark McCormack and Sheriece Bracey in the BI team means I am kept updated!

And no it’s not IG… like most people think for NHS analysts.

My best part of my job…
The team and the culture at ICHP. Quite simply ICHP is a fun, exciting and empowering place to work.