This joint release appeared last week – sponsored by the Digital Health CRC.
Joint media release – Digital health platform aids clinicians in COVID-19 treatment
A $4 million digital health project involving health services, clinicians and researchers will enable front line medical workers treating COVID-19 patients to use real-time data and analysis to improve health outcomes.
The Digital Health CRC‘s Clinical Data and Analytics Platform (CDAP) will help decision-making by clinicians by providing nationally available real-time analytics on the progression of COVID-19 to severe disease.
Digital Health CRC CEO Dr Victor Pantano said COVID-19 had created an unprecedented challenge.
“We currently don’t have well established and proven treatments for COVID-19 anywhere in the world,” Dr Pantano said.
“The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need to have effective and timely ways to gather information about people and to analyse this immediately so that doctors can use that information to guide the way they treat the patient in front of them.
“Such real time use of data has not been possible to date. CDAP is one way in which this can be achieved.”
Professor Matthew Bellgard, Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) eResearch Director, is leading the CDAP project and acutely recognises the imperative to work closely with patients and support medical staff dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic to obtain immediate access to the latest treatment strategies and clinical trial outcomes.
“The close involvement of both Queensland and New South Wales Health departments will ensure sharing and cross-fertilisation of knowledge and expertise of health professionals across both states for real world impact,” Professor Bellgard said.
“We are also working closely with consumer groups and privacy and ethics experts to ensure that the way we create and use the platform complies with the expectations of the community and legislation.”
The CDAP is based on funded work by MTPConnect. The project’s partners include the Digital Health CRC, Queensland Health, NSW Health, the Commonwealth Department of Health, QUT, Monash University and the University of Sydney.
University of Sydney Professor Tom Snelling, who is CDAP’s clinical lead, said the COVID-19 pandemic had shown how quickly clinicians needed to be able to adapt to changing conditions.
“We need digital solutions that improve our knowledge of how best to manage people with COVID-19 in near real time,” Professor Snelling said.
“The CDAP has been built to rapidly extract and organise clinical data, which will help us learn why some people have severe disease and which treatments result in the best outcomes.”
Professor Tim Shaw, the Digital Health CRC’s Director of Research, said the platform would support clinicians during the COVID-19 crisis but also had a longer and broader focus.
“We have funded this project both to support COVID-19 outcomes and to provide a lasting platform that can be used for multiple care contexts,” Professor Shaw said.
“This project will allow us to help solve some of the issues we face in accessing and sharing national data sets to support front line care.”
Professor Ann Nicholson, of Monash University, who is leading the analytical modelling aspects of CDAP, said causal Bayesian networks would help clinicians and scientists understand COVID-19 disease and health outcomes in an organised way.
“This decision support tool will be used to predict which patients will need hospital and intensive care admission, as well as the likely outcomes of interventions, as we learn more about this disease over time,” Professor Nicholson said.
“We hope that this approach can save lives but also keep more people out of hospital, which will put less pressure on our healthcare systems.”
Queensland Health Acting Deputy Director-General and Chief Clinical Information Officer Professor Keith McNeil said: “Queensland Health is delighted to partner with academic and industry leaders on what is a critical initiative, not only in aiding our response to COVID-19, but also in building the digital ecosystem for the future delivery of healthcare.”
QUT’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Innovation, Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik, and Professor Robyn Ward, Executive Dean Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney joined together to say both institutions were very pleased to be supporting a team with a proven track record of research excellence across a number of specialities ranging from digital health, governance, adaptive clinical trials, Bayesian network modelling and clinical decision making.
“Within this consortium, QUT’s strength is critically required in an overarching team effort to address the most pressing needs in digital health in the context of our COVID-19 response,” Professor Barner-Kowollik said.
The research described in this project is conducted with funding support from the Digital Health CRC Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC). The DHCRC is established and supported under the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Program.
Here is the link:
The title of the study seems to be as reported by Uni of Sydney - The Pandemic Imperative: Clinical Data and Analytics Platform to improve clinical outcomes through point-of-care decision support, Shaw T, Snelling T, Digital Health CRC Ltd/Research Grant.
A quick read shows that there are a large group of academic heavy hitters involved and that can only be good but I am left with a nagging concern about how all this will play out.
The apparent idea is that on the ground treating clinicians will use the system to decide what to do next with patients with COVID-19 infection based on information contained within the platform. Just how that is to be achieved is not clear given the very low number of very unwell patients that have been seen in Australia unless the platform is essentially an aggregator of clinical studies from elsewhere merged with the data obtained from groups like the Intensive Care Society and the like here in Australia.
I have to say I would be very interested to know who the clinical carers and hospitals were in this study and how they were envisaged to be using the system. The don’t seem to be mentioned in the press release.
I also wonder just how long it will be before the platform is evaluated ethically etc. and made available clinically. As I am sure the clinical lead – Prof Snelling – knows, there are all sorts of issues in providing point of care decision support around accuracy, safety, currency and reliability. Data security and privacy are also sure to be issues.
I know you can’t explain all the details in a press release but a little more technical information would assist the curious to understand just what was going on and what might be delivered over what time-frame. I guess we wait to see what is actually delivered?
What do others think? Does this sound like a project with real prospects or a piece of vapourware?
David.
2 comments:
David, your observations and comments are particularly apt.
To the expert marketing - communications eye it is blatantly obvious that this is a vapourware puff piece, pure and simple, with lots of names and quotes added to give the reader a sense of 'it sounds good, so it must be good, ipso facto it is good'.
Opportunistic research bodies tapping into an overflowing bucket of Coronafunds before the tap gets turned off.
"it is blatantly obvious that this is a vapourware puff piece"
Not to those at whom this is aimed - interested members of the public, academics in allied filed and funding authorities, none of whom really understand what is being said. It sounds good but is mostly technobabble.
Translating what the press release is saying:
1. The CDAP is a platform, otherwise known as infrastructure. It does nothing itself, it needs data and software to deliver anything. It is not clear if it contains either yet.
2. There is no patient data in the CDAP
3. The CDAP will contain medical research and reports on clinical trials
4. Professor Matthew Bellgard said “We are also working closely with consumer groups and privacy and ethics experts to ensure that the way we create and use the platform complies with the expectations of the community and legislation.”
The way we create and use the platform suggests it has not been built yet.
5. However, Professor Tom Snelling (CDAP’s clinical lead) said "The CDAP has been built to rapidly extract and organise clinical data, which will help us learn why some people have severe disease and which treatments result in the best outcomes."
6. What Prof Snelling doesn't say is how that will happen. Maybe he's relying on that often hoped for, but seldom encountered, Project Management step TAMH (Then a Miracle Happens)
7. The press release fits into the infodemic category, mentioned a few days ago.
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