September Seminar Series
September 2, 2025
It was great to welcome back DRIVE-Health PhD student, Dr Hugh Logan-Ellis - a Diabetes and Endocrinology Registrar at King's and ex-Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Dalhousie University - who delivered our September Seminar Series. In his talk “Extracting Clinical Value from EHR Data: Challenges, Pitfalls, and Practical Lessons", Hugh shared what clinicians have taught him about the reality of working with Electronic Health Record data and what they genuinely need from #AI tools, rather than what researchers might think they should want.
Hugh has learned that making the most clinically useful tool could matter more than theoretical perfection. He'll discuss some principles he's gathered to help create AI solutions that fit seamlessly into clinical workflows, which he hopes might help others bridge the gap between academic research and genuine patient benefit.
Using his PhD research on creating a single unit of health from #EHR data as a central example, Hugh will explore broader challenges: the messiness of real-world clinical data, the proliferation of unused risk scores, and why so many promising algorithms never make it past publication. These insights aim to help researchers develop tools that won't just die in papers, but have a real chance of improving clinical care.
Seminar Series Event: "Extracting Clinical Value from EHR Data: Challenges, Pitfalls, and Practical Lessons"
Date and Time:
Thursday 25 September 2025, 12:00 – 13.00 hrs (BST)
Location: The Judy Dunn Room, SGDP Building, Denmark Hill Campus, London, SE5 8AF
Attendance:
Mandatory for all DRIVE-Health students, therefore please accept the calendar invitation.
Registration: Alumni and wider King's College London research community all welcome - please email
drive-health-cdt@kcl.ac.uk
to let us know if you would like to attend.
Abstract:
Picture the scene:
It's Saturday morning, you're the senior resident doctor on call in a busy hospital, and you have a 40-page list of patients due for review. Half of your junior colleagues have called in sick, and you know you can't possibly see everyone. How do you decide who needs to be seen most urgently? The information to make these decisions is in the electronic health records, but accessing it quickly means opening each patient's chart individually. My PhD tries to tackle this problem: could we use an algorithm to compress scattered clinical data into a single, practical number?
This question has led me on an interesting journey. I've spoken with clinicians from around the world about how they decide who is "sickest," discovering a surprising variety of terms for essentially the same idea and realising we might need more than one measure. My research has taken me to Canada to collaborate with Professor Kenneth Rockwood OC, whose groundbreaking work on frailty measurement has significantly shaped clinical practice worldwide. Working alongside him has given me valuable insights into why some academic ideas successfully transform patient care, while others remain confined to journals.
As I explored increasingly sophisticated approaches to measure sickness, from simple laboratory-based indices to complex machine learning models, I stumbled across a key insight. Supervised machine learning can hindered by retrospective health data because when sick patients are successfully treated, they don’t have poor outcomes. This isn't just a quirky finding relevant to my PhD; it has broader implications for using a supervised paradigm on retrospective data whenever effective treatments are already in place.
Bio
Hugh is a resident medical doctor specialising in Internal Medicine and Diabetes and Endocrinology, working on his PhD at King's College London. His research focuses on measuring patient health status using electronic health records, drawing on his experience working across various healthcare settings in the UK and internationally.
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We are delighted to welcome Srinivasan Vairavan , Director of Digital Health and AI Biomarkers at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine R&D and Visiting Lecturer at King's College London , to deliver his seminar, "Precision Psychiatry through Digital Phenotyping: Lessons Learned from Three Longitudinal Studies in major depressive disorder" , as part of the EPSRC DRIVE-Health Seminar Series. Abstract: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) remains diagnosed and monitored almost entirely through episodic, subjective self-report, limiting both clinical care and trial sensitivity. This lecture presents evidence that passively collected digital signals can objectively characterize core MDD symptom domains and track an individual's mental state continuously between clinic visits. Drawing on more than 1,000 patients across three major longitudinal cohorts — RADAR-CNS, ORBIT (NCT02489305), and CANBIND — we describe methods that translate subtle behavioral and physiological data into clinically interpretable biomarkers. Paralinguistic analysis of speech is used to quantify psychomotor retardation, while fractal signatures derived from actigraphy index depression severity and impending relapse. Building on these markers, we present a personalized, N-of-1 anomaly detection framework that fuses passive digital streams with intermittent self-report to flag elevated relapse risk at the individual level. Results support the clinical validity of this approach. Digital measures, including speech intensity, showed significant associations with clinical outcomes. The relapse prediction model achieved a balanced accuracy exceeding 71%, with a median detection lead time of two to three weeks prior to clinical onset and a low false alarm rate — a profile compatible with real-world deployment. The lecture will also address principal sources of measurement variability, including seasonal effects, and the emerging relationship between cognitive performance and digital biomarkers. Together, these findings indicate a shift from episodic subjective assessment toward objective, unobtrusive, and continuous monitoring in mental healthcare — with near-term implications for patient selection and endpoint sensitivity in clinical trials, and longer-term potential for personalized diagnosis and treatment in MDD. Seminar Series Event : "Precision Psychiatry through Digital Phenotyping: Lessons Learned from Three Longitudinal Studies in major depressive disorder" Date and Time: Thursday 15 October 2026, 13:30 – 14:30 (BST) Location: The River Room, King’s Building, 2nd Floor, Room KIN 227, Strand Campus Attendance: Mandatory for all DRIVE-Health students; a calendar invitation has already been sent. Registration: Alumni and the wider King's College London research community are welcome - no booking required. Biography Srinivasan Vairavan , PhD, is Director of Digital Health and AI Biomarkers within Neuroscience Data Science and Digital Health at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine R&D, and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. He has over 15 years of experience building and scaling AI, machine learning and advanced analytics capabilities across pharma and healthcare, with prior roles at Proteus Digital Health and Philips Research. His work translates large-scale clinical, digital health, molecular and EHR data into regulatory-grade endpoints, including engagement through FDA Type C meetings and EMA Qualification Advice, and co-development of the industry-wide V3+ framework. He leads and contributes to major international consortia including RADAR-CNS, RADAR-AD and AMP-SCZ. He holds patents in relapse prediction in major depressive disorder and speech-based detection of cognitive decline, sits on the editorial board of BMC Digital Health, and serves on the DRIVE-Health advisory board.

We are looking forward to welcoming Professor Honghan Wu, Professor of Health Informatics and AI at the University of Glasgow, who will deliver his talk “Large language model and Radiology: how to facilitate human and AI collaboration? " as part of our Seminar Series. Abstract: In this upcoming talk, Professor Honghan Wu explores the essential shift from viewing AI as a potential replacement for radiologists to recognizing it as a critical collaborative partner. Moving beyond basic tasks like detection and triage, the presentation highlights how AI can address practical clinical "pain points," such as reducing automated protocoling time by up to 60% and decreasing the time spent communicating with providers and patients by 30%. Professor Wu will present recent research on using knowledge-retrieval and Large Language Models for clinical report error correction and generation. The session concludes with an examination of the real-world deployment lifecycle, discussing the challenges of monitoring the over 700 FDA-cleared radiology AI devices currently in practice Seminar Series Event : “Large language model and Radiology: how to facilitate human and AI collaboration?" Date and Time: Thursday 25 November 2026, 15:00 – 16.00 hrs (GMT) Location: Venue to be confirmed. Attendance: Mandatory for all DRIVE-Health students; a calendar invitation has already been sent. Registration: Alumni and wider King's College London research community all welcome - please email drive-health-cdt@kcl.ac.uk to let us know if you would like to attend. Biography Honghan Wu is a Professor of Health Informatics and AI, based in the School of Health and Wellbeing of the University of Glasgow, where he leads the research theme of data science and AI. Prof Wu is a co-director of Health Data Research Scotland. He also is an honorary professor at Hong Kong University, an honorary associate professor at Institute of Health Informatics, UCL, and a former Turing Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. Prof Wu holds a PhD in Computing Science. His current research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge graph and their applications in medicine.



