Originally published by King's College London on 17 July 2024
Two new projects at the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Driven Health (DRIVE-Health) at King’s College London will help harness healthcare data for clinical predictions and decision making through collaboration with e-money current account start-up, Science Card.
DRIVE-Health has launched two PhD projects in collaboration with Science Card - the UK’s first financial institution to offer e-money current accounts dedicated to accelerating science and innovation.
Science Card provides funding to scientific research and innovation from their own profits, and from their customers’ contributions. The projects will be on the Science Card platform for customers to support with their day-to-day transactions.
The projects form part of the first DRIVE-Health PhD project call since it received £7.9 million funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) earlier this year. Over the next nine years, DRIVE-Health will generate 85 PhD studentships focusing on research into the application of health data, and with the potential for significant impact on the delivery of healthcare worldwide.
Harnessing AI to transform healthcare
The first project, led by Professor Richard Dobson at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), aims to enhance patient care by applying artificial intelligence (AI) to the extensive data collected by the NHS. Building on his team’s existing work with Large Language Models, the goal is to be able to transform unutilised data into predictive insights and set standards for safe AI use in healthcare. This will lead to the development of personalised treatments, improving patient outcomes.
The team aims to use AI to comprehensively understand and predict the progression of conditions including motor neuron disease (MND), collaborating closely with leading MND care centres and utilising data spanning nearly two decades.
"We are very excited to be partnering with Science Card. Their mission to propel scientific discovery through innovation in the themes of healthcare and computing aligns completely with our EPSRC DRIVE-Health Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT), which will train students to become health data scientists and engineers, as well as research and innovation leaders of tomorrow, with support from UK pharma, biotech and big tech and the NHS."
Professor Richard Dobson, Co-Director of DRIVE-Health and Professor of Medical Informatics at King's IoPPN
Professor Dobson added: “Students from our pilot CDT are already impacting healthcare in areas including the development of pipelines to accelerate drug discovery, hospital workflow simulations tested in real world settings and launching spin-outs. We’re looking forward to growing the CDT through this important partnership.”
Enhancing healthcare decision-support systems
The second project, led by Professor Vasa Ćurčin at the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine, aims to deliver a step change in healthcare decision-support systems by addressing the complexities of managing multiple clinical conditions, preferences, and goals within electronic health record (EHR) workflows.
The team will develop a medical recommendation model which integrates patient history, lifestyle factors, and medications to provide clinicians with timely, reliable, and consistent decision support.
"Science Card’s model is very well suited to what DRIVE-Health is doing, as we are operating across several research areas and not restricted to a single question, or a single field. Outputs of our PhD students are of broad importance, and will have a massive impact on the quality of life for people in the UK and internationally."
Professor Vasa Ćurčin, Co-Director of DRIVE-Health and Professor in Health Informatics at King's
Explore DRIVE-Health in more detail
