NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme · Cohort 10
CauseACTION is a Microsoft-native intelligence layer that bridges the gap between how NHS care is supposed to be delivered and how it actually is — in real time, at every level of the system. Built within the tools NHS staff already use. No new infrastructure required.
Work as Done WELL
The NHS generates more information than almost any other system on earth — records, device logs, checklists, team messages, maintenance reports. Each fragment captures part of how care is actually delivered. But they are siloed, disconnected, and designed for transactions rather than understanding. The result is harm, waste, and burnout that nobody intended and nobody can easily see.
A national NHS study across 78 Trusts found that over a third of day-of-surgery cancellations were potentially preventable — caused by poor drug management, untreated comorbidities, or incomplete workup. The information to prevent them exists. It is just never surfaced in time to act.
SHOT data consistently shows a significant proportion of NHS transfusions fall outside clinical guidelines — yet only a fraction of events reach formal reporting. The variation that matters most goes unexamined.
Test. Replace. Datix. Supplier call. MHRA review. Team debrief. Safety report. MDT discussion. Each step done in isolation, recorded separately, learned by nobody.
Sickle cell trait does not appear on a standard FBC. In cardiac surgery, an unidentified patient may receive cold cardioplegia and standard bypass — the precise conditions that promote sickling. Results from previous testing often exist somewhere in clinical records, but never reach the team planning the case.
A high-risk patient. An unplanned emergency call. Six of eight MDT colleagues on their day off — because no system had assembled the clinical picture in time for a planned response. This is what a missed flag looks like in practice: a crisis that should have been a routine pathway.
The NHS does not have an information problem. It has a connection problem. Cardiac theatres generate data that could prevent the next patient's kidney injury. Pre-assessment clinics produce letters containing the haematology result that should have changed the bypass plan. Rota systems hold the staffing picture that would show a unit approaching unsafe coverage before anyone is harmed. The information exists. However, it frequently doesn't reach the person who needs it, at the moment they need it.
"Healthcare often feels like a conveyor belt where we never make the same thing twice. Staff are mixed like lottery balls; no one quite knows who made what or how — and the building is on fire."
That observation came from two decades at the clinical frontline — watching colleagues make heroic adaptations to broken systems, with no mechanism to capture what they learned or feed it back into anything. When John encountered human factors and Safety-II thinking in 2018, it named what he had been watching: the problem was never motivation or individual failure. It was system design. And the gap between how care is planned and how it is actually delivered is not an exception. It is the norm.
The ambition was to close that gap through reflection, conversation, and improvement cycles. But every attempt ran into the same wall: capturing work as done required extra effort from already stretched people. When it happened at all, it generated actions that nobody had time to follow through.
The method was right. The infrastructure was missing. CauseACTION is that infrastructure.
CauseACTION is built by NHS clinicians who have already used data to identify a hidden national patient safety crisis — and driven systemic change as a result. The methodology is not theoretical. It has already worked at national scale.
CauseACTION was not conceived in a design studio. It grew out of real analytical work — a national investigation into cardiac surgery staffing safety that required emailing 50 clinical leads individually, chasing responses, manually analysing data, and producing a picture that degraded the moment it was captured. The investigation uncovered a significant national compliance gap. The evidence it produced has been used by the College of Clinical Perfusion Scientists to drive enforcement of national standards. The lesson it taught was that the methodology worked — and that doing it manually at scale was neither sustainable nor safe. CauseACTION is that methodology, made continuous and automatic.
Chief Perfusionist at Barts Heart Centre and founder of CauseACTION. John has spent two decades working in cardiac surgery at the clinical frontline, developing expertise in human factors, systems thinking, and Safety-II methodology. His work spans clinical practice, national quality improvement, and device innovation. He has presented on safety and innovation topics at the national conference six times, and has served on the College of Clinical Perfusion Scientists since 2017, currently as Secretary. He brings deep clinical insight, frontline experience, and a clear vision for what a genuinely connected NHS could become.
NHS Clinical Entrepreneur · Cohort 10Chief Clinical Perfusionist at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and one of the UK's leading voices in perfusion quality management. James holds an MBA with specialist focus in interorganisational performance and perfusion data management systems. He has worked across multiple NHS Trusts, private organisations, and two global industry leaders, presenting at international congresses. His contribution to CauseACTION is the universal QMS architecture — the living standard operating procedure framework that makes the platform a genuine quality assurance system, not simply a data tool.
NHS Clinical Entrepreneur · Cohort 10Both cases below are real and finished. They answer the question every commissioner will ask: what does this actually do? One shows CauseACTION working vertically — making a single complex decision vastly more intelligent and transferable. One shows it working horizontally — turning a fragmented national process into something continuous and automatic.
Replacing a Heart-Lung Machine is one of the most consequential procurement decisions a cardiac department makes. The right decision is rarely the cheapest device — but proving that requires simultaneous command of three data domains that are never held in the same place: clinical risk evidence (what are the safety implications of current versus candidate equipment?), clinical outcome data (what does published evidence show about device performance in comparable populations?), and displacement economics (which ancillary devices does the new HLM render redundant, and what is the net revenue saving against the capital premium over 5–7 years?).
These rationales are not always aligned. A device with superior clinical safety evidence may carry a higher capital cost. A device with lower complication rates may justify its premium through AKI avoidance alone. The financial argument cannot be constructed without the clinical evidence — and the clinical evidence means nothing to a CFO without the financial model. This synthesis is what makes the decision hard and what makes it so consistently done badly, defaulting to incumbent inertia or capital cost alone.
This analysis was built from scratch over two years by a single expert. It was successful — but most departments do not have the time, the data access, or the headspace to replicate it. CauseACTION systematises it: structured clinical input, automatic financial modelling using Trust-specific data, standardised CFO-ready output. Every completed case feeds the national knowledge base. The next department does not start from a blank page.
The N+1 standard requires a second perfusionist available for out-of-hours cardiac emergencies. Compliance varies significantly across NHS units, and non-compliance is a structural patient safety risk. Understanding the national picture required individually emailing approximately 50 perfusion managers, chasing non-responders manually, aggregating responses, and producing an analysis — weeks of senior clinician time for a snapshot that was already degrading by the time it was published.
This is not an isolated problem. Dame Penny Dash's 2025 review of NHS safety found that monitoring recommendations are consistently not acted upon — not through indifference, but because the process of continuous monitoring is simply too hard with the tools available. The survey illustrates exactly this: the methodology was sound, the findings were important, and it cannot be repeated often enough to track deterioration in time to intervene.
CauseACTION makes this continuous. Structured digital capture replaces ad hoc emails. Direct rota system integration replaces manual submission entirely. Real-time N+1 compliance monitoring flags units approaching non-compliance before a gap becomes a risk. This is the proof of concept for a universal QMS with national oversight — the infrastructure that makes the Penny Dash recommendations actionable rather than aspirational.
"Data and analytics should be playing a far more significant role in supporting the quality of health and social care."
"We collect more data on quality of care than any other country. Let's use it, let's get it out there."
Dr Penny Dash — Review of patient safety across the health and care landscape, DHSC, July 2025
Together, these cases are the proof. What a senior clinician currently spends months doing manually — CauseACTION makes available to every department in the NHS simultaneously, at negligible marginal cost.
CauseACTION works within the tools NHS staff already use — no new login, no behaviour change, no survey fatigue. It connects clinical, operational, safety, and financial data into a single intelligent system that learns from work as it actually happens, not as it was planned.
The architecture is built on the SEIPS 3.0 framework — the established systems engineering model for patient safety — combined with Safety-II methodology and network theory. This is not a dashboard bolted onto existing systems. It is a structured model of how healthcare work is actually organised, where variation originates, and what it costs — deployed within Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, and Azure, using infrastructure NHS Trusts already operate.
Each Trust retains full ownership and control of its own data. CauseACTION maintains a central intelligence layer — the ontology, causal models, protocol logic, and benchmarking standards — that is deployed locally within each Trust's own environment. The Trust owns the data. CauseACTION owns the logic that makes it meaningful. This federated design aligns with NHS information governance requirements and the architecture of the NHS Federated Data Platform.
At its core is a living quality management system — built on James Tyrrell's universal QMS architecture — that captures real-time deviations from protocol, surfaces the cost of variation, and creates a continuous feedback loop between frontline staff and organisational learning. The system is designed for people at every level. It aims to amplify the weak signals that help staff understand each other better, and faster.
The same architecture scales from a single clinical pathway to a whole Trust, from a Trust to national oversight — connecting cause to action at every level, without adding to the burden of the people already keeping the system alive.
Rather than isolated data points, CauseACTION assembles the full picture of a patient's journey — giving clinical teams the context to act on what they see, not just react to individual alerts.
Staff contribute to quality intelligence through the conversations and tools they already use. The system learns from every adaptation, every near-miss, and every workaround — without adding a single extra form.
Standards and protocols are living documents — updated by evidence from real practice rather than periodic review cycles. What works is amplified. What fails is surfaced before it causes harm.
A digital twin of the ideal service — a simulation of the optimal pathway — lets teams understand the gap between current and optimal performance and model the clinical and financial impact of closing it before committing to change.
Real-time visibility of stock, usage patterns, and supply fragility at both local and national level. Aggregated data informs the optimal response to supply chain breakdown — enabling mutual aid, early warning, and procurement aligned to actual clinical demand.
Benchmarking that goes beyond headline metrics — revealing whether variation between services reflects genuine clinical difference or unwarranted divergence from safe, effective care.
In cardiac surgery, we once relied on a single timed test to assess whether a patient's blood was protected against clotting on bypass. It gave us a number. It told us almost nothing about why — about the dynamic interplay of clotting factors, platelet function, fibrinolysis, and drug effect that determines whether a patient bleeds or thromboses. A more sophisticated test changed that entirely: instead of one value, it gives a time-resolved picture of the whole clotting process — its speed, its strength, its breakdown. The difference is not just more data. It is a fundamentally richer understanding that enables earlier, more targeted, and more effective intervention.
One number. No context. No trend. No interaction between variables. An answer without understanding.
Multiple signals. Interactions tracked. Trends identified. A complexity score that reflects the real state of a pathway — not a simplified proxy of it.
CauseACTION applies this same principle to clinical pathways, workforce, safety, and quality — replacing single-metric dashboards with a dynamic, multi-dimensional understanding of system health. The stress fractures in a service appear long before the system breaks — if you know how to look.
The oxygen delivery example below shows this principle applied directly in the cardiac theatre.
Oxygen delivery index (DO2i) during cardiopulmonary bypass is increasingly reported by modern heart-lung machines — already an advance on single-value measures. But a low DO2i reading tells you something is wrong. It does not tell you what to do about it, because the causes are multiple, concurrent, and interacting — and they look different at different points in the operation:
A haemoglobin of 82g/l against a bypass flow index of 2.4 l/min/m² places a patient near the lower DO2i threshold before surgery has even begun — a deficit that compounds every subsequent challenge.
When surgeons displace the heart to reach posterior vessels, venous return falls — dropping pump flow and DO2i. This is routine, predictable, and durationally quantifiable, but its cumulative effect on an already borderline patient is rarely visible in real time.
Different perfusionists respond differently to blood loss: some add crystalloid solution to maintain volume; others accept lower flows. Each approach affects haemoglobin concentration differently — and therefore the oxygen delivery index differently. This variation exists but is currently invisible across teams and centres.
Low haemoglobin triggers a transfusion decision. Crystalloid solution added for volume dilutes haemoglobin further, worsening oxygen delivery. Reduced oxygen delivery drives further transfusion need. Each step is a consequence of the last — a chain that is hard to see as a chain when each decision is made in isolation.
Oxygen delivery to tissues during bypass is continuously measurable — and CauseACTION correlates it continuously with haemoglobin concentration, bypass flow index, venous pressure trends, fluid balance, and surgical stage, tracked over time rather than at a single moment. This makes the causal chain visible: a near-threshold haemoglobin at bypass initiation, a 12-minute heart displacement reducing venous return by 35%, a 300ml crystalloid bolus that drops haemoglobin by 6g/l and takes the patient below the oxygen delivery threshold for the first time. Each event quantified in duration and severity. The relative contribution of each factor to suboptimal oxygen delivery surfaced as a sequential picture rather than a single alarm.
This level of visibility changes what quality improvement can actually address. Is the problem poor pre-operative anaemia pathways — patients arriving on bypass already borderline? Is it venous cannulae selection or surgical positioning technique? Is it variation in fluid management practice between perfusionists? All of these are long-known but poorly understood contributors to acute kidney injury. CauseACTION makes the multifactorial causes visible and attributable — which is what turns improvement from a general aspiration into a specific, addressable target.
One quality metric. One modifiable factor. A single example — and a modelled £14 million in preventable harm.
Now consider what becomes possible when this method is applied to the interactions between the thousands of modifiable factors across every NHS pathway — pre-operative optimisation, intraoperative decision-making, post-operative escalation, medicines management, workforce deployment, supply chain resilience. Each factor individually measurable. Each interaction between them currently invisible. The scale of preventable harm, waste, and variation that sits in those interactions is not a rounding error. It is the defining challenge of healthcare quality in this generation. CauseACTION is built to make it visible — and therefore addressable.
CauseACTION has defined its first clinical pilot pathways, with site selection and governance scoping underway across NHS centres in London and Scotland. Each targets a different level of the system, deliberately chosen to show that the same approach works at every scale.
Most theatre cancellations have upstream causes — but the inverse is equally important: patients who are not optimised but proceed to surgery anyway, carrying preventable risk. This pilot maps the whole pre-operative pathway to understand both failures — the cancellation and the inappropriate go-ahead — as two symptoms of the same underlying gap between how care is planned and how it is delivered.
Applying language processing to pre-operative documentation to automatically surface high-risk conditions — sickle cell disease, coagulopathies, complex drug interactions — that current systems identify late or miss entirely. Earlier flagging triggers the right pathway, the right specialists, and the right planning — before the patient reaches theatre.
Connecting stock data, usage patterns, and supplier status across services — locally and nationally. Aggregated data reveals patterns of fragility that no single centre can see alone, enabling mutual aid between sites, proactive procurement, and an optimal system-wide response when supply chains break down.
Only a tiny fraction of transfusion safety incidents reach formal reporting nationally. This pilot applies the CauseACTION architecture to blood transfusion — connecting procedural data, clinical outcomes, and near-miss signals to surface the vast majority of variation that currently goes unexamined, creating the conditions for genuine national learning rather than tip-of-iceberg oversight.
Cardiac surgery is where CauseACTION begins — because it is where the founders work, where the data is time-critical and the acuity is high. But the architecture is universal. The same system that monitors a perfusion protocol can monitor a medicines pathway, a discharge process, or a neighbourhood health network.
The N+1 survey demonstrated that a clinician with the right methodology and the right data can surface a national patient safety problem that had been invisible for years. CauseACTION is that methodology — operationalised, automated, and designed to make that kind of discovery routine rather than exceptional.
The goal is not another reporting system. It is a learning architecture — one that connects cause to action, at every level, without adding to the burden of the people who are already keeping the system alive.
The NHS cannot afford avoidable harm — financially or morally. The cost of getting it wrong is already embedded across every Trust budget, every litigation settlement, and every cancelled theatre list. CauseACTION is not an additional cost. It is the architecture that makes the existing cost of poor quality visible — and therefore reducible.
CauseACTION's commercial model is structured around demonstrated value, not software licensing. The system is deployed within each Trust's existing Microsoft infrastructure — no new platforms, no additional IT procurement. The commercial relationship is built on what the system helps the Trust achieve, making the business case straightforward for any finance director prepared to look at where quality costs are already being absorbed.
NHS Resolution estimates the annual cost of harm covered by the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts at £4.6 billion — and that is only what is claimed. The National Audit Office estimates only 4% of people who experience harm ever make a claim. Source ↗
The cost of cancelled surgery in lost operating theatre time alone reaches £400 million per year across the NHS. The majority of avoidable cancellations have upstream causes that a connected pathway system could identify in advance. Source ↗
Preventable adverse events generate £1–2.5 billion in additional NHS care costs annually — longer stays, repeat procedures, complications that compound. These costs are largely invisible within standard reporting. Source ↗
The NHS Patient Safety Strategy has demonstrated that targeted, systematic safety improvement saves £100 million annually alongside 1,000 lives. CauseACTION is the infrastructure that makes that kind of improvement scalable and routine — not exceptional. Source ↗
"The NHS is drowning in safety recommendations it cannot action."
National Audit Office, cited in Parliamentary review of clinical negligence costs, 2026
The gap is not knowledge — it is infrastructure. The recommendations exist. The evidence exists. What is missing is the mechanism to make continuous monitoring automatic, to close learning loops in real time, and to make the right action the path of least resistance for the people delivering care. That is what CauseACTION builds.
We are building the intelligence layer healthcare deserves — and we are looking for the right partners to build it with.
If your service is dealing with preventable cancellations, unexplained variation, or quality data that never feeds back to frontline staff — we would like to understand your pathway.
If you are working within a Microsoft 365 or Azure environment and exploring how existing data infrastructure can be turned into operational intelligence — let's talk architecture.
If you are working on NHS innovation, funding early-stage health technology, or exploring partnership with a CEP Cohort 10 team — we are at the right stage for the right conversation.