‘Conversations with our Network’ series – Bluemetrix

This month we were delighted to talk with Liam English, Founder and CEO at Bluemetrix, a full-service data company. Bluemetrix is an Associate Partner of EIT Health Ireland-UK, with its HQ located in Co. Cork in Ireland, where Liam is from.

Prior to Bluemetrix, Liam amassed a wealth of experience internationally, from studying and working in Japan for ten years, to becoming the first web analytics provider to operate in the Japanese market. Having founded Bluemetrix in 2003, the company has grown exponentially under Liam’s leadership.

To date, Bluemetrix has been involved in the construction of over 400 data lakes across EMEA and APAC and is now recognised as one of the most innovative and successful big data implementation and consultancy companies in Europe. During the pandemic, Bluemetrix supplied innovative data lake solutions to the NHS on their COVID-19 data, helping researchers investigate solutions to the pandemic.

During our chat, Liam explained to us about how the Bluemetrix data solution has evolved over the years, and how the company is helping healthcare providers adapt to become data driven.

Tell us about Bluemetrix

When Bluemetrix was founded, its purpose was to provide Hadoop and Data Lake consulting services across the globe. As we carried out 400+ Data Lake projects with large blue-chip enterprise clients, we quickly discovered that the same challenges came up time and again on each project. Challenges such as:

• Ingesting data correctly onto the data lake
• Quality checking the data as it was ingested
• Capturing the governance of the data as it entered the lake
• Anonymizing the PII data on the lake
• Exposing the data to business users once it was on the lake

To solve these problems, we created an ETL automation solution which eliminates complexity across the entire data pipeline creation. This, in turn, improves the quality and governance of the pipelines produced for analytics and data science teams. 

Our solution includes data ingestion, schema evolution, data validation, data masking and tokenization, data transformation, data governance and orchestration and management of data workflows in production on a collaborative platform.

Drawing from this experience, we are now working with data executives to help them solve common problems many organisations face, such as:

• Integrating all their data sets into one location for processing and analytics
• Automatically capturing the governance and compliance of all activities on the data
• Migrating the data to the cloud
• Making the data available to technical and business users in a secure and compliant manner

Bluemetrix joined EIT Health’s network as a partner last year. Why did you join Europe’s largest health innovation network?

Partnering with EIT Health offers us a unique value proposition that aligns well with our vision at Bluemetrix to leverage data for better healthcare. EIT Health offers a platform for us to work in an international and collaborative environment. We can provide advanced data solutions to healthcare providers through EIT Health’s extensive network of partnerships across different industries, benefitting many healthcare stakeholders in Europe.

How can you help healthcare organisations manage their data?

Given the sensitive nature of health data, healthcare organisations face some unique challenges around data ownership and processing, for example in integrating their data sets and deriving value from combined data sets.

Our team at Bluemetrix has extensive experience in integrating Electronic Health Records and patient level data sets for operational and analytical processing. We understand how to carry out this work in a secure and compliant manner while dealing with multiple data owners and stewards. We ultimately deliver a data lake which can be used for the organization’s analytics and healthcare research.

In what ways have you collaborated with EIT Health as a partner?

We have participated in several key EIT Health thought-leadership events since our partnership began, as discussions around healthcare innovation continue. This exposure generated subsequent engagement from European healthcare professionals interested in Bluemetrix’s healthcare data solutions for operations and research.

Our team at Bluemetrix was delighted to get the opportunity to contribute, along with other EIT Partners, to the European Commission’s submission for the European Health Data Space report.  This will influence the future shape of the European Commission’s policies around data and how Europe can utilise health data within the existing GDPR framework to benefit patient outcomes. It was of great value to us to be part of a think tank that could contribute positively to our own activities in this space in future.

To learn more about Bluemetrix healthcare-focused work in the past, please click here.

Liam joined a panel discussion back in January providing practical advice on ‘How to Deploy Data at Scale in Healthcare environments.’ The recording is available to watch on demand here.

To learn about EIT Health partnership options for industry please contact clc.ireland-uk@eithealth.eu