IBM’s Watson computer is better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors. In Scotland analyses from a national database of diabetes patients has enabled treatment to be targeted, resulting in a 40 per cent reduction in the number of amputations carried out as a consequence of the disease. Real time analytics developed by McClaren Electronics for monitoring the performance of Formula 1 racing cars have been applied to monitor children in intensive care at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, leading to a 25 per cent reduction in life threatening events.
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These are some stunning early examples of how the ability to interrogate the mountains of data generated by healthcare systems and medical research is now being applied to help transform the quality, effectiveness, speed and quality of care.
But member states and Europe as a whole, stand at a cross roads. Using patient data will improve public health and individual care, but concerns about the privacy and security of this very intimate class of information must be addressed. How much data is too much data? What are the rules to be on how and who can manipulate it? How should the regulatory framework be modulated to give patients confidence their privacy will be respected, whilst allowing this huge potential for improvement in how healthcare systems are administered and in the quality of care delivered? Does Europe need a pan European system for data protection?
Make medical information comprehensive and timely
The objective should be to ensure that medical and healthcare information can be made available to doctors in the same timely, precise and digestible format as the real time view that pit crews have of how a Formula 1 car is performing, Dan Pelino, General Manager at IBM told a Science|Business webinar, Smarter Data for a Healthier Society, held on Tuesday (12 February). “We are looking for physicians to have the data available and a voice in the patient’s ear, like a race car driver who can be called in for attention and within seconds go out to join the race again,” Pelino said.
Such a capability is foreshadowed in a project between IBM and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where, using IBM’s Watson cognitive computing system, the number of cancers diagnosed correctly on the basis of the first opinion increased from 50 per cent to 90 per cent. Watson achieved this improvement after oncologists and technology experts taught it how to process, analyse and interpret the meaning of clinical information using natural language processing. To date, Watson has digested 600,000 pieces of medical evidence and two million pages from research journals. The machine has the power to sift through 1.5 million patient records representing decades of cancer treatments and to list evidence-based treatment options in seconds.
This capability is needed to capitalise on the huge volume information that is being created by healthcare systems. “Only a small proportion of this data is being leveraged. Physicians spend five hours per month looking at new information, while the amount of medical data has doubled in the past five years,” Pelino told the webinar.
Seeing life-threatening events earlier
Similarly, the McLaren Electronics system for monitoring Formula 1 cars is being used to analyse outputs from clinical monitoring systems in the intensive care unit at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and synthesising them into intelligence that can be used proactively to prevent cardiac arrests. “It enables you to see life-threatening events earlier, by identifying when the pattern starts to change,” said Peter van Manen, managing director of McClaren Electronic Systems. Whereas previously staff would be alerted to a cardiac arrest when it happened, now there is a warning beforehand and it is possible to take action to avert it.
Van Manen said only minor modifications were made to the system used in Formula 1 to make it suitable for use in healthcare. The technology is suitable for use in children and adults and is scalable, robust and reliable.
Smarter data, better cross-talk
Smarter data technologies then, are not only enormously exciting, they are just what healthcare needs to spread innovation coming out of biomedical R&D and improve the way in which resources are deployed and healthcare is delivered. Smarter data can also act as the glue, or the channel, for all the cross-talk between disciplines and sectors that is required in a modern, efficient healthcare system.
But while few would deny this potential, there is cause for disquiet. The underlying value system on which the exploitation of smarter data is to rest has not been articulated, Amelia Andersdotter MEP (Pirate Party, Sweden) told the meeting. “No one denies you can get benefits from analysing data, but it makes people feel uncertain. [The technology] can profile diseases, and so on, in a way there is no control over,” she said.
To move forward, there needs to be more political vision and more meaningful public engagement, Andersdotter believes. “Don’t just present this to the public and say there’s a benefit; I’m taking your data but don’t worry.”
Robert Sourhami, Foreign Secretary of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences agreed. Patients’ groups are not “instinctively antagonistic” to the use of medical data for research, but they need to understand the relationship between the benefits and possible harms. It’s also important to draw the distinction between the use of an individual patient’s data for their own treatment, as in the Birmingham children’s Hospital example, and the Scottish project, which is collecting information for all diabetes patients.
This webinar sets the scene for a research launch and conference in Brussels to be held in April, which will look in greater details at the issues raised.
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