Healthcare researchers to tap into AI for innovative solutions
Posted on: 22 May 2018
The Trinity Centre for Practice and Healthcare Innovation (TCPHI) – the research centre for Trinity’s School of Nursing and Midwifery – is expanding its research collaboration with IBM Research Ireland. The expansion will see TCPHI researchers work with Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts from IBM Research Ireland to advance a programme of research focused on finding effective and innovative solutions for integrated care and self-management in healthcare.
The programme seeks to advance the understanding of applying AI to help interpret, in real-time, the vast volume of data and patterns captured from patients via smart and embedded medical devices. The analysis of such data, at scale, has the potential to transform clinical decision-making across the continuum of healthcare delivery.
Director of TCPHI, Dr Catherine McCabe, said: “TCPHI has been particularly successful in developing research collaborations with industry and this has culminated in this evolving research collaboration between the centre and IBM Research Ireland.”
“The use of data analytics and AI solutions will further help to ease the transitions in care, complex health systems and services. Studies show that to improve productivity among caregivers is to make it easier for them to capture and to share information, which allows them to focus on the priorities of care and clinical decision making. AI can help play a key role at identifying the right information and supporting this decision making.”
Attending the announcement of the expansion of the research collaboration was Dr Wendy Belloumini, Director of IBM Research Ireland, and Professor Anne-Marie Brady, Head of School of Nursing & Midwifery, on behalf of Trinity. This important milestone in the School's development and expanding partnerships was emphasised in an address on behalf of Trinity by Dean Of Research, Professor Linda Doyle.
This exciting and timely co-operation between TCPHI and IBM Research Ireland will involve:
- Collaborative funding applications and research projects in the field of digital health and integrated care
- Collaborative publication of research and innovation in the field of digital health, AI and integrated care
- Development of PhD and MSc research student opportunities in the field of digital health, including internships with IBM Research Ireland
- Development of education programmes in digital health
- Development of Adjunct Professor roles from IBM to TCPHI
- Participation in international conferences, seminars, symposia, workshops and other activities agreed by both parties
- Exchange of academic materials and other information
The new collaboration follows on from a successful collaboration in recent years between IBM Research Ireland and TCPHI on ProACT (Integrated Technology Systems for ProACTive Patient Centred Care) — an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project, which targets Europe’s 50 million multimorbid patients to proactively self-manage and offset the EU’s annual €700 billion cost of chronic disease management. ProACT aims to develop and evaluate an ecosystem to integrate a wide variety of new and existing technologies to improve and advance home-based integrated care for older adults with multimorbidity, including associated co-morbidities.
Collaboration is critical to success in today’s ever-changing healthcare environment, with unprecedented availability of health related data being produced in increasingly complex care systems. But what we do with that data? How do we effectively use it to innovate across and within health systems, with colleagues, and with service users to effectively improve the quality of healthcare? Research driven by the expanded collaboration should provide some answers to these pivotal questions.
About the School of Nursing and Midwifery, and TCPHI
This year the School of Nursing and Midwifery is celebrating 21 Years of national and international excellence and leadership in nursing and midwifery education and research at Trinity College Dublin. Its success is reflected in a ranking of 1st in Ireland and 25th in the World in the QS World University Subject Rankings 2018.
One of the many events held by the School as part of this celebration was the research symposium, at which the expansion of the collaboration with IBM Research Ireland was announced.
TCPHI facilitates and supports research collaboration between patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, healthcare providers, colleagues at Trinity and other universities, research and innovation centres, health policy makers and industrial and enterprise partners.