Breathe easy with BIG data

Author

Grant Reilly

Published

21st November 2018

Category

News

Chronic Respiratory

Breathe easy with BIG data

The Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) is leading a new collaborative Next Generation Asthma Care project.

The innovative project aims to use next-generation technology, service re-design and citizen-generated data, to drive improved, meaningful, and sustainable models of care that focus on positive impacts for the patient.

People with Asthma and health professionals will be invited to workshops to co-design new approaches, interventions and ideas that explore how asthma care might be delivered in the future.

Project success depends upon:

The development of next-generation technology (such as those being developed in another collaborative project being led by DHI and Edinburgh Napier University

Achieving a detailed understanding of what restricts and influences the scalable adoption of these new innovative solutions

Building a trust relationship between patients and health professionals when digitally sharing personal data

The DHI has a great deal of experience in leading and collaborating with organisations to achieve these project outcomes. The aim is to transform the way asthma data is captured, analysed, and interpreted to produce solutions that will predict the likelihood of asthma attacks; aid clinical decision making; and drive better targeting of healthcare resources. The benefits of this for an individual is a better quality of life as their care plan will be personalised to their needs.

The project aligns with several UK and Scottish Government policies which aim to put the people rather than services at the centre of health and care transformation.

Professor George Crooks OBE, CEO of DHI, said:
“This is an exciting collaboration that allows us to use next-generation technology to develop a service model that will empower and support asthmatics and assist health care professionals to make better-informed decisions about an individual’s personal care plan.”

Brigitte West, Innovation Manager at Asthma UK, said:
"Two out of three asthma deaths could be preventable if patients received basic care but in order to ensure patients get this care, there needs to be an urgent review of new service models to support people with asthma and stop life-threatening asthma attacks. There is great potential in using new technology to enable innovation. Collaboration is critical to ensure these new technologies will benefit people with asthma as soon as possible.”