Clinical content lead

This is an exciting opportunity for a detail-oriented clinician to join our award-winning healthtech startup as the clinical content lead. Manage and curate the Concentric ontology – trusted by thousands of clinicians every day.

The role

We are seeking a thorough and methodical clinician to join the team to lead our clinical content work (a resource called the Concentric Ontology). Already the most comprehensive consent resource globally, the successful candidate will broaden content reach into new treatment areas, deepen the evidence base for existing content, mature processes alongside operational colleagues, and improve the clarity of writing for our patient audience.

This role is as clinically-minded a role as you’ll find in the healthtech space. You'll need to feel comfortable getting into deep-work mode and delving into the evidence - often in niche clinical topics, enthusiastically engage with and work with clinician users to support their use of Concentric, and grow into a role managing other clinicians and their writing.

With Concentric used across all specialties and sub-specialties the requests for new content have yet to slow (despite over 2,000 treatment templates!), and existing content also undertakes review cycles in response to several different drivers, for example, new publications changing the evidence base, updates from Royal Colleges or Specialty Associations, or international adaptations. This work is done alongside other Concentric clinicians and continuous feedback from the network of clinician users.

As organisations deploy and use Concentric there are often considerations and adaptations that are needed for their version of the Ontology. Sometimes this is as simple as adding local patient leaflets, but at other times requires more detailed changes, for example, to reflect local rates of complications or surgical approaches. This work will often be done directly with clinicians (generally at registrar or consultant level) at the various organisations, supported by project managers on both Concentric and healthcare organisation sides.

Alongside other colleagues, the role will also involve collaborating on ontology-related innovation projects such as exploring mechanisms to manage content at scale (e.g. LLMs), developing tooling to support the content process, and extracting learning from real-world usage of ontology templates, for internal development and publication purposes.

The ontology

Our ontology powers the clinical content within Concentric, providing the application with structured, evidence-based data regarding thousands of procedures, treatments, and clinical concepts. It’s also integral to driving some of the complex functionality around searching for treatments and combining treatment templates.

Developed iteratively since 2013, and more formally since 2019, the ontology is an interesting mix of simple and complex. In some ways it’s quite simple (if undeniably large) - a collection of thousands of files each defining clinical concepts and various properties, such as risk profiles for a treatment, or lay descriptions and synonyms for treatment indications.

In other ways, it’s a complex beast. For example, it’s structured like a graph and builds on other ontologies such as SNOMED-CT, with clinical concepts cross-referenced across the ontology, rather than being defined within each treatment template. Whilst this makes scaling content quicker, it brings with it the challenge of understanding the knock-on effects of changes across the ontology.

Much of the work developing the ontology is done to our main version, with improvements being pushed at scale into real clinical use across many of the UK's leading healthcare organisations on a fortnightly basis, whilst some time is allocated to support local teams who have requested modifications to existing templates. All our clinical content work is subject to a defined (but iterative) process, as per our PIF Tick certification, which the successful candidate will be responsible for.

Key responsibilities

Content development

• Identify gaps and curate content for treatments not currently covered within the Concentric ontology. This will involve several approaches, such as exploring the available evidence base, leveraging Concentric intelligence (such as episodes for the treatment created from ‘blank’ by a clinician), and utilising external specialists, whilst ensuring appropriate consistency with similar treatment templates within the ontology.
• Improve, refine, and deepen the evidence base for existing content via review cycles. These are triggered based on time, feedback, and/or updates from external bodies.
• Plain English reviews to improve the clarity of writing for our patient audience.

Content management

• Mature content management processes, such as triage, prioritisation, and communication with requestors, alongside operational colleagues.
• Respond to, manage, and clarify content requests from clinician users.
• In response to feedback, adapt content for individual healthcare organisations’ local practices, complication rates, and patient information.
• Maintain appropriately triaged, sorted and prepared content request tickets for actioning by the clinical team, via company tooling such as Notion.
• Ensure and co-ordinate clearly communicated change documentation for own and others’ work, via company tooling such as Github.

The ideal candidate will…

• Have a strong clinical understanding across several surgical specialties, and a comfort with engaging with clinical areas outside existing areas of expertise. This is likely to be from having completed core training in a relevant specialty (e.g. surgical specialties, anaesthetics).
• Have excellent written communication skills, with a mature understanding of how to communicate effectively with different audiences, including patients.
• Be detail-oriented and organised, with experience in preparing polished written work for public audiences.
• Be comfortable managing competing priorities, including delivery pressures from clinician users relating to content requests (this can be challenging, but is a personal development opportunity in terms of management).
• Have a shared passion for improving the consent process and supporting shared decision making within healthcare.

How to apply

To apply please send a CV and cover letter or intro video by email to Daf (Co-founder and CEO). Equally, if you’d prefer an informal chat first, we’d welcome that, please do just get in touch.

In terms of process, we’ll be filtering applications as they come in so we’ll be in touch in a few days to let you know if we think we might be a match or not. The plan is then to do a content test, followed by a final interview if appropriate.

A polite note to say we won’t be engaging with recruiters or agencies for this role.

Key colleagues in this role

Dafydd Loughran

Co-founder and CEO

Daf started writing the Concentric ontology for his own use as a surgical SHO back in 2013. It's moved on a lot since then! Daf's still involved in content review, sharing his decade of experience with this unique resource.

Listen to Daf sharing the Concentric founding story

Chloe Fox

Clinical operations lead

Chloe is the key Concentric contact for our deploying organisations and manages the relationship with project teams. There's always plenty of discussion between content lead and operations lead to communicate and manage priorities.

Connor Moore

Current clinical content lead - moving to innovation role

Connor has been the clinical content lead since 2022, overseeing a period of significant growth in clinical use. Alongside moving to an innovation focussed role within the business, Connor will support the onboarding process for the successful candidate.