ADAPT, DCU and ELITE-S Researchers to Receive NSAI Award for Health Data Integration Project

11 January 2021
ADAPT, DCU and ELITE-S Researchers to Receive NSAI Award for Health Data Integration Project

Dublin, 14 October 2020: Fittingly launched in 2020, the Year of the Nurse, a Common Semantic Data Model (CSDM) for complex Healthcare Networks is a project spearheaded by DCU Professor Pamela Hussey and DCU and ADAPT Centre Researcher Dr Subhashis Das. As part of the ELITE-S Fellowship Programme, the project seeks to sync together the complex network and sources of healthcare information to provide easier access not just to hospitals, but to the secondary care clinics, patients’ families, and primary care teams as well.

There is a huge amount of data collected through the electronic healthcare record (EHR) about an individual’s health, which has continued to grow exponentially in recent years. Healthcare data is now increasingly being gathered and accessed not by humans, but machines through our ever-growing network of IoT devices–things like smart watches, constant glucose metres, or ingestible sensors, to name a few.

The Actor-Network Theory (ANT) helps us understand how these IoT devices work within a social system of caregiving and how one factor impacts another. However, the theory is limited to one aspect of understanding, which is incomplete in a complex system like modern healthcare with its many variables. The proposal from our researchers, the CSDM, seeks to address the variety in data with a hybrid approach based on two popular standards, FHIR and OMOP. This approach will enable the maximum data fields to be captured in every aspect of healthcare.

ADAPT’s Dr Subhashis Das says, “The CSDM project will enable interoperability in different healthcare settings via ontology to achieve a smooth transfer of data in a scenario of continuity of care.”

Professor Pamela Hussey and Dr Subhashis Das have been recognised for their proposal by the (National Standards Authority of Ireland) NSAI and are being presented with the Innovation Award at a virtual ceremony this afternoon. Dr Das has existing expertise and established relationships within EU projects such as InteropEHRate which has enabled us to accelerate our capability in this project.

This project is under the ELITE-S Programme which offers 16 prestigious 2-year Fellowships in 28 technology and application areas such as: 5G, security, cloud computing, IoT, open and big data, interoperability, fintech, smart cities, etc. The ADAPT Centre, hosted in DCU, is an international hub of scientific expertise related to information and communication technologies (ICT) standards in areas such as data and regulation technologies, data privacy and protection, content analytics, machine learning, preservation, personalisation and interoperability, data and process management.

This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 801522, by Science Foundation Ireland and co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology grant number 13/RC/2106 and DAVRA NETWORKS

Share this article: