Partner profile: Robert Gill

Blue Hat Associates Partner Rob Gill Tim shares his insights on the pace of technology change in the pharma and healthcare sectors.

In this new blog series, we introduce you to each of our Partners.

Blue Hat Associates is a collective of entrepreneurial technology leaders who’ve all lived through the challenges of scaling SaaS businesses. Working across Finance, Health, Media, Advertising and the Public Sector, we help clients achieve tech and product goals quicker and more cost-effectively. Combining strategic leadership, with a nearshore talent pool of over 1600 consultants, means we provide the flexibility, innovation and pace that scaleups need to grow.

Introducing Rob.

Rob started his career in the pharmaceuticals industry building systems for supporting drug discovery before transitioning his skills to financial services. He has over 30 years software Industry experience.

As a data architect he designs platforms for the management and delivery of multi-dimensional data. Rob has a passion for data. He is also local councillor and Patient Advocate.

How has the pace of technological change influenced the way you do your job?

I don't actually perceive there to have been a huge changing pace! I think that it's been pretty steady. People may perceive it to be fast-paced change because they don’t necessarily see the incremental advancements, they see the big things that get hyped up. Take large language models (LLMs) for example, progress has been bubbling along under the surface for years but ‘suddenly’ LLMs are the hot topic of 2024.

Regardless of the pace of technological change, my approach to work is consistent. As a technology leader, I need to keep abreast of trends and new methods and technologies. I’ve been doing this for a long time, but it still surprises me when things get over-hyped!

How do you help your clients build an organisation that can keep up with the pace of change? 

In a previous life, I ran a team of around twenty people spread across four geographical locations. It was part of everyone’s role to keep up to date on technology advancements in their areas. My role was to ensure that knowledge was shared across the team. Everyone knew it was part of the job, not a nice-to-have.

I say the same to clients - part of the job is to stay abreast of ‘what’s going on out there’. Even if their role isn’t tech-focused, they need to ensure their tech teams are keeping their knowledge fresh. You can’t be blinkered and purely focus on what you’re doing. Of course, deliverables are important, but keeping an eye on relevant developments is also important.

How do you keep up with new technologies? 

Personally, I learn by trying. To take something new in and truly understand it I have to ‘go play’ with it. Some people can do that by just reading. I like to get hands-on – and reserve Friday afternoons, when I can, to do this. I have a list of things I really want to get my head around and I’ll block some time to follow a tutorial or write something.

I encourage team members and clients to do the same – depending on their technical disposition. Not everyone learns the same way, so it’s important to find what works for you.

It’s good to try and make it a habit too; creating regular slots to learn. I’ve heard it called “micro-learning” i.e. small, regular learning sessions to keep building your knowledge.

What's next in Pharma & Healthcare sectors? 

The next big thing for Pharma? The realisation that data quality is of the utmost importance! There’s always been a lot of talk about being data-centric or data-focused. But the reality is that no one has ever properly achieved this…yet. It’s been the next, new shiny thing for a while (a bit like mobile was for a few years), but there’s always been something more important to do; it’s never quite topped the very top of the to-do list. Maybe because it’s not the most exciting topic, or that it can be particularly challenging to get right. Maybe there’s not been enough cultural inertia to prioritise data above all other things?

But it can’t be ignored forever, particularly as the healthcare world is very much about the quality of data. What I mean by that is that in other sectors, the focus is on the product. In pharma, the data is the product. The data tells you what the problem that needs solving is. So, the quality of data is imperative. And once the focus shifts to that, things will change.

What technologies do you think stand the most chance to change your clients businesses in the next 3-5 years?

I think knowledge graphs and graph technology are a huge deal as they take you away from data being very flat (like spreadsheets and most databases). The data in healthcare has a huge number of dimensions and that where network visualisation tools can really help.

And I think there’ll be a revolution in the visualisation of data. Someone will come up with a new concept or approach as, currently, it’s still quite hard to fully visualise the inter-relationships between data dimensions. At some point, we’ll find a way to do this better, perhaps by linking to LLMs; giving them the ability to query the data and return a text-based report. That’s where I think the big change will happen. Until then, we’re stuck in two dimensions (which is quite limiting).

It's probably a good time to bring up the idea of ‘context’, i.e. how people write down their thoughts into documents (the why behind the what). For them, what they’ve just written makes absolute sense, because they have the full context of what and why they’ve written it (at that moment in time). The writing has a structure that they understand. And yet a similar person writing a similar thing may structure it very differently. Because their context is different.

So, context is very important, and, currently, computers don’t understand context. It’s another big hoop we need to jump through to see significant change. Knowledge Graphs go a long way to help with this, allowing context to be broken into specific entities and relationships, the key is how to manage all this data and apply standards and drive a level playing field.

What kinds of technology problems do you think will drive the next wave of innovation?

Healthcare has always been about data. It’s quality and quantity. Healthcare produces huge amounts of data, be it image, Genomics, clinical information etc. It’s incredibly difficult as a research scientist to keep on top of all the information and that’s where I see the next big leap. LLMs & GenAI are at their core search implementations, but with the ability to take huge amounts of data and bring that together in a much more user acceptable manor.

I see an evolution of these into tools supporting researchers and research decisions along with validating ideas and offering ways to look at hugely dimensional data in more efficient ways.

What client projects are you particularly proud of, and why?

I can’t pick favourites from our current clients so I’ll dive back into the archives for this one! Many years ago, perhaps a decade or so (when I worked in Pharma) there was a particular type of technology that came out that allowed us to collect little fragments of DNA. We would then build them together to try to get as much information on the gene as possible.

This was pre Genome Project so there was no whole genome just a world of these tiny little tags called ‘express sequence tags’ which lived in these database. A colleague and I built a system to bring all that information together and made these pre-built mini genomes,

The reasons I’m still proud of the work? Because it was built by a person with little IT skills at the time. The work also lived on (past me leaving the company) and was given away to lots of different organisations to make use of. This piece of research turned into something that was really helpful and useful to a broad range of people.

Why did you join Blue Hat Associates?

I’ve worked in companies and as an independent consultant. What drew me to Blue Hat is wanting to be able to work with other people on interesting problems and projects.

Working within a team like Blue Hat means that you get to throw ideas around and get a diverse set of eyes on a problem.

There’s a phrase you’ll have heard of: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. At Blue Hat, we have the full toolkit (so to speak) so we’re able to properly diagnose the problem before even picking up a hammer/wrench/screwdriver!

What's next for the Pharma & Healthcare team at Blue Hat?

We’re working on an interesting project at the moment, finding a proper scientific use case for a large language model. LLMs are currently capable of doing good old-fashioned search. It’s much more interactive (than traditional search) of course, and allows people to bring together data sources, but to me it’s still very much search and retrieve.

There’s no research going on, i.e. telling us what we should know so that we can go and do something about it. I’d love to work on something that goes one step further where the tech can start coming up with novel ideas, theories, options and opportunities. I think this is the next step; merging unstructured and structured data in a way that’s driving towards novel ideas (without going too crazy in the hallucination space). I wrote a guest blog on this topic for techUK recently.

Think of an LLM that we don’t just prompt, but that can prompt us back to explore ideas and give us a better sense of direction for problem-solving. My personal point of view is that an LLM will never be anything more than a co-pilot, but there’s still scope to make it a better co-pilot that it currently is.

Thanks for reading, we hope you’ve found it insightful to get to know Rob’s perspective on the tech landscape. You can learn more about our other Partners and get in touch for a free, friendly chat anytime.