A state of the art information-driven health care demonstrator: Combining advanced technologies in the gastro-intestinal field

Information-driven healthcare must be based in best practice in ICT, healthcare, elecronic patient records, and the realities and timetables of national delivery plans for working systems. Swansea University brings together a unique team with internationally recognised skills in all relevant areas, as well as very close links with the national programme, Informing Healthcare, for introducing new ways of accessing, using and storing information in healthcare. Swansea has a clinically-approved research laboratory to simulate all aspects of ICT support in healthcare, which is being used by Informing Healthcare to evaluate its systems and the systems of suppliers.This project is based on a multidisciplinary research team, drawing together clinicians, system implementers, computer scientists, machine learning experts, and user centred design (UCD) expertise. A central part of any information-driven healthcare system is the user interface that presents relevant patient record data to clinicians, for instance on a web portal or on a PDA. Such systems must be rigorously designed and support best practice in many areas (clinical, security, privacy, user centred design, performance, data integrity, etc). Moreover, innovative uses of ICT, such as AI and ML (machine learning), to enhance the clinical effectiveness must also be realised appropriately: an information-driven healthcare system does not just deliver data to users, but supports decision making in a real-time, error-prone environment.For the exploration study of the Grand Challenges within Information-Driven Healthcare EPSRC/MRC call, Swansea will develop an iconic demonstrator/exemplar system that illustrates a state-of-the-art system, though focused within the gastrointestinal clincial speciality, where we have systems we built (GeneCIS) as well as clinical expertise. The system will be both a demonstrator of what is possible, as well as a platform for further research in many aspects of user interfaces to health record systems in general. Thus, while the main visible work of the project will be the dialogue and dissemination of records of workshops, white papers etc, it will be based around a real (though inevitably prototype) benchmark system and actual use knowledge.The exemplar system will build on GeneCIS and Swansea's world-leading Blue C supercomputer clinical databases, and previously-funded EPSRC work in ML. The research is supported at the highest levels by Informing Healthcare, and the interdisciplinary nature of the proposal (combining computer science, engineering and medical departments) is strongly supported by the University's research strategy.