Technology innovation company Catalyst Corporation have announced their part in the creation of a new partnership designed to reduce health inequality and improve access to care for underserved populations.

Health-Equity.AI will interrogate and interpret a wide range of publicly available health data to identify and map disparities related to wealth, location, ethnicity or age. In order to execute such a complex project, the new venture brings together expertise in both medicine and data science.

Dr Rav Seeruthun studied medicine at Imperial College London and was a GP in the NHS before moving to the pharmaceutical industry where he has held senior commercial and medical roles in the UK and US. To launch Health-Equity.ai he has partnered with Professor Ian Colwill, a computer science engineer who is currently the director of several companies including Sussex Innovation members Catalyst Corporation, and is a visiting professor at the University of Sussex.

“It is shocking and unfair that in 2023 underserved populations do not have equal access to healthcare and innovative life-saving medicines,” said Dr Seeruthun. “Health-Equity.AI are the bridge helping to make these disparities visible, so when we uncover them, we can partner with the right people to solve them.”

“There is a huge amount of unstructured healthcare data available,” explains Prof Colwill. “The part that’s missing is to get across all those different data sources and make some sense of them. AI allows us not only deal with such a large volume of data, but also to recognise signals from the noise that are beyond human capability to typically identify. The AI will see things a human never will.”

Once these signals have been uncovered Health-Equity.AI partner with the relevant stakeholders to help solve these disparities. Their first customer is a ‘top 5’ Pharmaceutical company who produce breakthrough cancer treatments where disparities were seen in both cancer screening and the treatments being prescribed. With plans to collaborate with the NHS as part of the second phase of their business model, they can help to ensure that everyone has access to the care they need.