The NHS-R conference concluded, and I am emotional that it has ended. There were some fantastic speakers and the whole event, from start to finish was a blast.

Openers

I would like to include everyone on here, but the openers that had an impact for me are included below:

Conference opening – the journey so far – Mohammed Amin Mohammed

What a great opener from Mohammed and it was really interesting to get a view of the direction of the NHS-R Community.

OpenSAFELY.org: proving the power of open methods for NHS data analysis

Ben Goldacre, you may have heard of his from his books on Bad Science and Bad Pharma, dropped in for a chat about the OpenSAFELY.org platform and the need for open methods for NHS data analysis.

Opening up Analytics by NHS-x

Sarah Culkin did a good talk on opening up new data analytics and the need for an open source mindset. Advanced analytics, was mentioned as another revolution and interesting work is at foot in the AI lab. Watch the video to find out more:

Excellent workshops

Prior to the conference, there were a week of excellent workshops. The ones I found most interesting were:

Regression Modelling

Chris Mainey did an excellent introduction to Regression Modelling. Check it out:

Pretty R Markdown and Presentations with Xaringham

This was a two part session:

Introduction to DPLYR and RMarkdown

Zoe Turner did a brilliant job of onboarding newer developers with DPLYR:

Awesome plenary talks

The plenary talks were awesome this year, as well as the Lightening talks. I have not watched all of the sessions, so I do apologise if I missed you out, but all the sessions can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/NHSRConference.

Computer Vision – how it can aid clinicians – Gary Hutson

Shameless self promotion – I did a talk on how Computer Vision can aid clinicians:

Building Predictive Models with HES data

Chris Mainey did another excellent slot looking at GAMS and Mixed Effects models, and how they apply to HES datasets:

Integrating R and QlikSense

Jamie-Leigh Chapman did a stellar job at showing the integration capabilities of R and QlikSense:

Decision Modelling in R and Shiny

A very interesting session by Robert Smith:

Causal Inference in Predictive Modelling

Great session from Andi Orlowski and Bruno Petrungaro:

Using ggplot2 polygon and spatial data to plot brain atlases

Athanasia Mowinckel has created an amazing package for displaying brain atlases:

R Code Quality: Does it Really Matter?

A great session on code quality and packages that can be used to scare the life of people with bad coding practice, sounds like all of my mates, and me:

APIs in R with Plumber

This session focussed on passing model parameters through from PlumbeR. Definitely something that will be very useful in the future:

Wowsome Lightening Talks

The Lightening talks this year, like everything else, were fascinating. The links to the three days worth of ligtening talks are included in this post:

The full playlist

The below YouTube link has all the sessions from the workshop. The ones contained in my blog were the ones I got chance to watch and I found these really useful and interesting. I am sure there are many more in the playlist that I have not had time to watch yet.

These can be accessed hereunder:

Subscribe to this YouTube channel and watch out for the excellent content coming out of this community. The belief is for 100% open source in the NHS and all our code is sharable.