This week the ADAPT Centre held the second webinar in its Creating Tomorrow’s World series focused on Healthcare in the Digital Age. In this latest discussion, Professor Martin Curley, Director of Digital Transformation and Open Innovation at Health Service Executive; Frank O’Donnell, Head of Public Sector for Microsoft Ireland; and Professor Lucy Hederman, a lecturer at Trinity’s School of Computer Science and Statistics and is a Funded Investigator with the ADAPT, discussed the big issues and opportunities facing the healthcare sector in Ireland.
“Our goal is for Ireland to be a leader in the EU in digital health by 2026” commented Professor Martin Curley during his talk. “We are at a unique point in time with multiple disruptive technologies all showing up at the same time, all information technologies, and healthcare is the most information intensive industry that there is so there is a real opportunity to contribute.” Professor Curley went on to discuss the HSE’s strategy for digital transformation and highlighted how the COVID 19 pandemic has positively impacted the innovation pipeline.
In the next presentation, Frank O’Donnell discussed how COVID has seen a big shift to virtual healthcare and highlighted how that shift has the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry once the solutions are built on secure platforms. “We have three areas in healthcare as a big focus for Microsoft, we try to support the enhancement of patient engagement, empower the health teams and their collaborations, and improve clinical and operational insight”. During his talk, O’Donnell focused on the insights area and explored the interoperability of data as a key enabler to address the challenges.
Picking up on the theme of data heterogeneity and interoperability, Professor Lucy Hederman used a number of examples that demonstrated how patient treatments and quality of health can be improved using Artificial Intelligence and data management. “Data interoperability and governance come to the fore in one project that we are working on in the ADAPT Centre. FAIRVASC focuses on the treatment of vasculitis and the research uses semantic web technologies to link vasculitis registries across Europe as a ‘single European dataset’. The compelling benefits of AI in terms of prediction modelling were highlighted among other areas during her presentation.
The full recording of the webinar is available on the ADAPT Centre’s YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/8-E2mLNCY3w
The next webinar in the Creating Tomorrow’s World series will focus on the Innovation Ecosystem: Spin-Ins and Spin-Outs and will take place on the 27th July. Registration for the event is online.
