Future of Evidence and Smart Health Conference

The healthcare sector is generating data at a faster rate than almost any sector and the availability of such data is already fundamentally changing the way we do scientific research and impacting on how we deliver clinical care. New digital tools and analytics offer the opportunity to better define and describe an individual over a lifetime and moreover how the interaction of biology, the environment and lifestyle underpins disease pathophysiology and the effectiveness of medicinal products and treatments. It is thus increasingly the vision that future scientific discoveries will be dependent on an ability to collate, share and interrogate the digital data related to our health status and generated through all walks of daily life.

Intrinsic to this vision is delivering infrastructures which can offer scalable and standardised tools for acquiring, organising, analysing and visualising this multi-dimensional data and allow opportunities offered by AI approaches to be realised. However, harnessing its value for economic and social benefit is difficult. Data is siloed by disease, institution, social care setting; data is of variable and often unknown quality and provenance; data is stored in different structures and terminologies and mechanisms of access are variable and geography dependent. Over and above this there are challenges around the culture of data sharing partly arising from ethical and legal considerations but also partly because of a belief that the data itself is a valuable commodity. Often however the intrinsic value does not lie in the data itself but in the processing, linkage and analysis of that data to enable differences in demographics, lifestyles and geographies to be captured.

Experts from regulatory, industry, technical and ethical fields will explore how data sharing platforms hosted on the cloud could be designed to remotely and securely store, manage and retrieve data globally, opening up opportunities for all to derive greater value from research, prevent duplication of effort and make evidence more generalisable.