Dr Subhashis Das, an ELITE-S Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellow at ADAPT Centre along with research colleague Dr Matteo Zallio, has recently received the prestigious ISO grant to establish clear, scientific and measurable impact of ISO standards on improving healthcare for everyone. The grant was bestowed for the first time in 2021 through Dublin City University’s Centre for eIntegrated Care (CeiC) and is expected to help fellow researchers, healthcare planners, standardisers, among others, across the world to study such impacts in their own domains.
The research plans to gather relevant data on diversity measures, healthcare service delivery initiatives, usage of digital health technologies, and so on, to understand whether ISO technical standards help the world get a step closer to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Additionally, the research is designed with a people-centred approach in mind. Thus, giving the opportunity to engage with the community and further verify findings through experts who are well-versed with the practical applications of technical standards in their daily work life.
While shedding light on the methodology of the research, Dr Subhashis said: “Measuring the impact is normally context-dependent and several challenges are present. Our mixed-method approach, based on quantitative and qualitative data sampling collected from text-based search and expert stakeholders’ involvement, has the potential to provide a rich, user-centric data set to inform how to define impact and determine the influence of certain technical standards in the domain of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”
This insightful and highly complex research project will be completed by October 2022 and can be expected to further inform the upcoming standardisation measures by ISO in the future.
