Digital Planning is proud to back healthcare innovation at the West Midlands Health Tech Innovation Accelerator hackathon, hosted by Birmingham City University.
Chief Science Officer Ben Hutchings represented Digital Planning as an industry partner. He brought deep sector experience to to support the development of breakthrough ideas and prototypes.
This comes as Digital Planning founders, Mark Underwood and James Ferraby, joined the judging panel for the University of Derby’s Cyber AI Hackathon.
Digital transformation in healthcare
Ben said: “Healthcare urgently needs digital transformation. From an industry perspective, practical solutions – especially those powered by AI and smart data – help to solve complex challenges and deliver reliable outcomes.
“Events like this hackathon help transform ideas into working concepts that can really improve care in the real world.”
He also set the challenge brief for students to explore how graph structured data can help AI systems search medical information, reformulate queries, and use context-aware information retrieval for more accurate, evidence-backed answers.
This approach makes advanced data simple to access through everyday language.
Research Engineer Ollie Anderson and Digital Transformation Specialist James Reed offered in-person guidance to student teams, translating real-world healthcare problems into tech-driven solutions.
Working with student teams to help build a GraphRAG pipeline that enables AI to extract useful patient patterns and support better clinical decisions.
GraphRAG is an AI approach that helps computers search and reason over large sets of medical data by connecting related information in a graph.
The students demonstrated this using the synthetic Synthea patient dataset, which safely simulates realistic health records while preserving privacy.
Industry collaboration
Over three days student teams addressed real healthcare challenges in-person at Birmingham City University.
Teams focused on extracting useful patient patterns from health data to support better clinical decisions, addressing challenges like siloed information, outdated processes, and limited use of AI in patient care.
Judges assessed the demo’s technical quality, relevance, and impact. focusing on how
They looked for how GraphRAG helps AI find and explain healthcare data more intelligently – giving detailed answers to natural questions using the synthetic graph dataset.
Digital Planning co-founder James Ferraby added: “Collaboration between young researchers and industry leaders is crucial.
“Events like this show how hands-on teamwork, fresh thinking, and direct feedback from experienced professionals can rapidly transform promising concepts into workable solutions.
“By bridging academia and industry, we’re not just developing technical skills – we’re building a culture of innovation that healthcare urgently needs.”
Healthcare, especially the NHS, faces complex issues – outdated systems, underused technology, and siloed data.
Many sectors have been radically reshaped by digital technologies, yet parts of healthcare are yet to enter the digital era.
The hackathon addressed these challenges by bringing students, mentors, and industry partners together – accelerating the pace of innovation, fostering skills, and showcasing the impact of digital health transformation.
