Health Productivity wins Deloitte’s 3rd annual Datathon

This year’s Datathon focused on the theme ‘Driving Productivity’ and attracted a record number of participants with an interest in data and technology from a wide range of industries and backgrounds. 

Datathon’s objective is to establish a meaningful link between data and trends to tackle issues facing contemporary society and which underpin social wellbeing.

The winning concept, from the team Health Productivity, focused on the correlation between mental health and productivity in the workplace and showcased a Business to Business concept demonstrating how increased mental health support can improve productivity, a key challenge facing the UK economy.

In awarding Health Productivity, the overall winners’ prize, the competition judges recognised the relevance of their topic in 2019, the depth of their data insight and the quality of their concept, which was underpinned by strong research into competitors and key success stories in other global locations such as Sweden.

Hosted in Deloitte’s offices in Edinburgh, the panel of judges for Datathon 2019 included; Melinda Matthews Clarkson, chief executive officer at CodeClan; Jude McCorry, head of business development at The Data Lab; Colin Cook, digital director at Scottish Government; and Kent Mackenzie, Risk Analytics Partner and global risk advisory digital & fintech/regtech lead at Deloitte. 

Melinda Matthews Clarkson and Colin Cook also featured as key speakers at the event, along with Mark Hunter, Chief Transformation Officer, Sainsburys Bank and Chair Person, The Data Lab.

Owalabi Ebenezer of winners Health Productivity, and an MSc Data Science student at the University of Stirling, said: “The Datathon was a great opportunity to network with like minds and learn from others in a collaborative working space. I’ve taken a lot of positives from this, particularly, working with people from different backgrounds and learning from other people’s experiences.”

Chris Brown, senior consultant at Deloitte, said: “Productivity change is both highly relevant and applicable to the use of data in today’s society.  As a challenge for this year’s Datathon, it takes into consideration current trends that have brought participants together across a range of industries to explore the variety of ways that data is used and how it can help us make better decisions, prioritise problems and develop solutions that benefit people across a range of sectors.”

Kent Mackenzie, Partner, Audit and Risk Advisory, at Deloitte, said: “‘Driving Productivity’ was a theme chosen for its topical relevance and importance, with the UK economy facing an ongoing productivity challenge, dating back to the financial crisis in 2008, and anticipated improvements in productivity related to disruptive technologies not fully materialising. With productivity closely linked to GDP growth, a lack of productivity growth is creating pressures across all sectors, most notably in the public sector.  This is an area we will continue to look at closely.”

Datathon ran from the morning of 11th March, culminating in final presentations on the evening of 12th March.  The event featured as a fringe event at DataFest19, Scotland’s nationwide festival of data innovation, which runs from 11th to 22nd March.

This year’s event was the third Datathon and the event continues to grow – this year saw more participants, both those taking part in the challenge and attending an accompanying evening event featuring keynote speeches from leading figures from the sector, over 50 open challenge data sets, and, for the first time, full open banking anonymised transactional data from AccountScore.