The path to real innovation often involves facing obstacles as well as possibilities. Miranda Mapleton has embraced both healthcare and technology, using challenges to drive innovation in the intersection of the two fields. As the CEO of White Swan, she leads the company in a direction that aims to enhance patient care by using data and analytics. Changing from corporate marketing to starting a non-profit organization showcases her drive and passion for making a big impact in the healthcare industry. Under her leadership, White Swan is leading the way in developing creative solutions that are influencing the future of healthcare.
Let’s delve into the interview details below!
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to become the CEO of White Swan?
After graduating in business, I pursued a marketing career at FMCG as a marketing director at PepsiCo and then at Mars. I then moved to eCom, heading up all Marketing for MoneySuperMarket to develop my D2C skills and expertise in marketing specialisms. After this, I followed my personal interest in health and wellness and decided to utilise my leadership skills for good. My good friend Steve King (co-founder and CEO of Black Swan Data Ltd) asked me if I would set up a not-for-profit offshoot of his business, I immediately said yes. I thrive on challenges and starting an organisation from scratch having worked previously in a bigger established business, in a totally new industry, felt like a great challenge! I started White Swan with a blank sheet of paper and a handful of volunteers. Today White Swan is a registered charity, operating globally, with a dedicated team, Board of Trustees and over 130 volunteers, working with highly respected organisations across the commercial, charity, academic and government sectors.
What is the mission of White Swan, and how do you envision its impact on the healthcare industry?
Our charitable mission is the improvement of health using technology and analytics. We specialise in utilising large volumes of anonymised social data to accelerate diagnosis, improve the effectiveness of treatment and develop better patient care.
What are some of the key challenges you’ve faced in your role, and how have you addressed them?
One of the first major challenges I faced was that I started with a completely blank sheet of paper – there was no ‘blueprint’ for success for a charity in this space. No organisation we could look to for inspiration. We were very much forging our own path, and being new to both the health and charity sectors this meant I had to seek input from a lot of different types of people to decide what we would create as our mission; how we would build a unique capability; what standards we would set for ourselves – both in what we did and how we did it. I had to attract talented people to volunteer their time for free to the cause – create a groundswell of enthusiasm for the mission – we now have 130 volunteers worldwide! Creating White Swan has without doubt been the biggest leadership challenge of my career to date and continues to present challenges I would never have had to overcome if I had stayed in large corporations.
How does White Swan prioritize innovation in its services or products?
Working in the technology sector, it’s crucial that we constantly innovate in order to be able to be relevant to our partners and clients. Even within our small team, we have dedicated resource working on our technology roadmap – creating new analytical capabilities and tools. These open up new possibilities for the datasets we work with, improve our efficiency and insight quality and also open-up the possibility for other key user-groups to leverage our insight. For example, we are currently looking to empower academic and clinical researchers by creating a ‘researcher platform’ window into our data. We access over 565k different data sources (including forums like Reddit and X) yet are always looking to add to these – for example we recently added Pinterest, TikTok and Threads.
Can you share a recent project or initiative at White Swan that you are particularly proud of?
We have recently had another paper published with our work in Nature. It is particularly interesting as it highlights the differences between academic understanding and perspectives on diseases vs those of the patients and utilises social data to uncover patient perspective and discover novel phenotype associations. It’s a great example of how social data can bring the patient perspective to the fore and it’s always good to have further independent validation of our methodology. A link to the paper is included below.
What advice would you give to emerging leaders in the healthcare sector?
Always remember that patients – people – are at the heart of our decision-making. Healthcare is about care – preventing disease and prolonging quality of life.
How do you foresee the future of healthcare evolving over the next five years?
Growth of personalised medicine to improve outcomes for patients. Technological innovation (including AI) to accelerate the speed and efficiency of clinicians – for example in imaging, scanning, diagnostics and creating more therapeutic options for patients (eg. medical devices, wearable devices, digital tools). Growth of genomics – increased understanding of how they can lead to faster and more accurate diagnoses. Patient-led accessibility – via growth of services like Telehealth.
What role do you believe technology will play in shaping patient care and healthcare delivery?
Technology can be a crucial enabler for better health outcomes – across the spectrum of accelerated diagnosis, improved treatments and better care. It will never replace the ‘human touch’ or ‘human to human care’ required in the sector, but with advances across the board it can step-change outcomes for patients.
The Inspiration behind the Charity
Julie King was suffering for over 10 years in a wheelchair undiagnosed with deteriorating health. Her brother Steve King (CEO and co-founder of Black Swan Data Ltd), not wanting to accept her prognosis, utilized his company’s technology to analyse millions of social conversations looking for patterns of her symptoms being connected with conditions. Two rarer conditions kept being mentioned and so he took this information to her doctors and convinced them to test her for these. It turned out she had one of these conditions – Parkinson’s Dystonia. Once correctly diagnosed and on the right medication her life was transformed – she’s completed triathlons and now competes in international cross fit championships! Seeing the power of social data to save and transform lives inspired the start of the White Swan charity.
If anyone would like to find out more, our website is: www.whiteswan.org.uk and they can get in touch at hello@whiteswan.org.uk
