How digital health improves personalised care

30 October 2024

Prof Sebastien Ourselin, Director of King’s Health Partners (KHP) digital health and data sciences, tells KHP News about the four pillars that shape the partnership’s digital strategy. A fully digitised health system, he says, can provide more personalised care for patients.

Please describe the KHP digital health and data sciences strategy?

KHP has three strategic priorities, and one of those is around digital health and data sciences. This is an umbrella bringing all the capabilities in data science research happening across the university at King's College London, in partnership with the deployment, development, and validation of digital health solutions within the partner hospital trusts.

As part of this we have a set of key pillars, and some of them are reflected through our recently established KHP Digital Health Hub, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Training

We officially launched the KHP Digital Health Academy website offering asynchronous and hybrid training modules and in-person workshops and clinics, to enable innovators to create digital health solutions. Our training will equip innovators to work together in a multi-disciplinary environment to develop and test safe and scalable solutions. This has been very successful already, and the content has been seen by more than 5,000 (including international) course participants.

Co-Design

Co-Design is a key consideration for all technology development where we continuously engage with patients and end-users and ensure public awareness, from the ideation stage all the way to prototyping. Our method is a highly effective way to improve digital health and care, as well as business outcomes.

Translation

From ideation to enabling deployment of a technology into the NHS environment is a complex process. Utilising our AI Centre for Value-Based Healthcare platforms and expertise, we are able to facilitate the development of digital products from ideas to clinical deployment within a HRA-approved ethical and technical framework.

Acceleration

Our fourth pillar is about taking the technology outside of KHP to the rest of the UK and internationally, which we achieve through commercialisation. On one hand, this includes partnerships with large companies. However, we also support the creation of new spinout technologies from our own organisations from the start to the eventual commercialisation and regulatory agreements.

Why is digital health and data sciences important in current and future healthcare?

Digital health and data sciences are becoming a core component of the delivery of healthcare worldwide.

We have the potential to access digital solutions in all aspects of our life – nearly everyone has a mobile phone, a tablet, a computer. Being able to access our own data and information online is becoming the de facto situation.

Personalised care

However, perhaps due to the challenging age of our infrastructure in the NHS this is not yet a reality within healthcare. If we manage to go fully digital, which is really an important component of any new healthcare system, then both patients and healthcare providers will have the full medical record picture. There won’t be a need for many paper notes, and you won’t have to look at several different databases.

Records will be standardised into one fully comprehensive report, which will enable medical staff to provide more personalised care to their patients because they will have all this information at their fingertips.

Not only is it better for you as a human, being able to read all the information of your own care, but it's also important for the system to be able to use new types of analytics. This is especially true in the context of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science, to be able to precisely evaluate the datasets that you have about your care.

It can be your blood test, some wet lab information, or imaging, the evaluation will bring it all together and build a more personalised medicine profile, which hopefully will improve your care.