CIMT Academy: Well-attended special edition
On the occasion of CIMT's PhD course, the CIMT Academy was able to open the doors to a special edition with presentations from three international researchers.
One of the researchers' overall points was that we must ensure that patients' data is secured when hospitals collaborate with private companies, as well as the companies' rights and any trade secrets must be preserved when research is published. In cross-functional cooperation, there is also a great responsibility for creating understanding among companies and programmers for everyday life and the tasks in the health sector.
Associate professor Kathy Kim from UC Davis herself represents all camps with a past in the clinic and as a self-employed person in the IT industry to a researcher today. She examines i.a. how machine learning can predict which cardiac patients are at greatest risk of readmission – and then offer telemonitoring to that group. She explained: “There are many projects on telemedicine to prevent readmissions of people with heart defects, but none of them reduce the number of readmissions. Therefore, we attack it from the other side and try to predict readmissions, so that it is the right patients who are offered telemonitoring”.
Professor Nick Anderson from UC Davis highlighted that digital does not necessarily equate to efficient. He has helped develop an index of maturity to help research institutions improve the systems and tools available to researchers. Factors in the index include that the systems can "talk" to each other and are easy to access, while both clinical and research data are stored securely.
Nick Anderson could tell that they tested their own institution against the maturity index and were quite disappointed not to be ranked as well as expected, even though it is a highly recognised research institution.