Roopa Foulger, Data and Advanced Informatics Lab Lead
Data Science and Advanced Informatics Lab
Like many other industries, health care is undergoing a fundamental change in how leaders make decisions about everything from finances to patient care. At the forefront of this shift is the role of data. Acquisition of new and old types of information and determining how to use them are of the utmost importance to not only find health care solutions, but to generate more complex questions.
How might we uncover data insights to become more discovery-driven?
As OSF HealthCare reimagines its use of data, participation in collaborative communities, made up of academia, government, industry and non-profit organizations will be a necessity. That’s because the scale of available data far surpasses the resources of any one organization to ingest and find value. While challenging, this new world provides ample opportunity to improve and innovate how OSF HealthCare delivers care.
The Data Science and Advanced Informatics Lab provides expertise and insights to participate in the technological advancement of medicine through the application of data techniques. Further, the lab has the ability to leverage newly established tools such as neural networks to task artificial intelligence (AI) with not only finding solutions, but to find the next set of questions that will advance health care.
But first, OSF must change how it collects, stores, and accesses data. As a result, the Data Science and Advanced Informatics Lab is creating a new infrastructure to leverage data with a focus on the speed and flexibility essential to deploy hybrid cloud solutions for future growth and interoperability. This will allow for critical access to explore value, employ advanced AI techniques and focus on the exact best way to serve those in the organization’s communities.
With this foundation, the Data Science and Advanced Informatics Lab can become a larger player in a community of collaboration to become a discovery-driven organization—one that pushes the quality of the hospital system’s practices by putting data and insights to work for patients.
Data in Action
- Secure federated learning for collaborative diagnostics: The need for collaboration is more apparent now than ever before. Data privacy and security are of particular importance in the medical field, as patient health information is one of the most valuable sets of data. The Data Science and Advanced Informatics Lab is developing new ways to safely share that information while also fostering a community of collaboration that leads to the next wave of innovations in health care. At completion, a framework for collaboration between multiple institutions to improve the robustness of data models without sacrificing patient privacy and security will dramatically improve upon current capabilities.
- Contactless vital signs collection: The pandemic brought up many challenges in how to take care of people without putting others at risk. From this arose the idea of developing a platform for gathering vital signs from people at home using existing technologies. In collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a company based in Sweden, the Data Science and Advanced Informatics Lab is prototyping such an app that uses machine learning to assess vital signs and funnel that information into the electronic medical record and telehealth applications.
- Predicting the dynamics of COVID-19: This project proposes to use a novel analytical approach that incorporates artificial intelligence, data analytics and machine learning to personalize treatment for those who could be COVID-19 positive. Information gleaned from this method could identify virus hot spots in a community and determine where to allocate resources such as staffing, equipment, medicine and space.
Help us transform health care using big data!
If you are interested in learning more about the Data Science and Advanced Informatics Lab, participating in certain aspects of the journey or if you want to invest or partner, contact us today.
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