Grant: Applied Research and Technology Partnership Grants

Worldwide, the costs and complexity of delivering healthcare are escalating rapidly, driven in part by longer human lifespans, the pervasiveness of chronic illnesses and infectious diseases, expanding regulatory and administrative overhead, and system-wide inefficiencies. Cost pressures are exacerbated by the growing convolution of the medical ecosystem and by expectations of better value-for-money, improved quality of care, and enhanced clinical outcomes by stakeholders at all levels, including patients, insurers, and governments. Record-keeping, compliance, and regulatory requirements have meant that organizations within the healthcare industry have historically generated huge quantities of data. These players are becoming aware that their accumulated "big data" may help them to overcome the challenges of healthcare delivery, but are not sure how.Discussions with our partners have revealed the following three gaps: (i) management understands that legacy data has inherent value, but does not know how to unlock that value in terms of new insights, products, and services; (ii) legacy data, typically captured over years or decades, is very often stored across multiple, disparate, heterogeneous databases which makes organizing and mining it difficult; and (iii) there is a pervasive lack of well-trained data analysts to tackle these challenges, and they are expensive to hire. There are therefore three general business needs facing health-related firms as they look for value in their historical data - for knowledge, technical capability, and skilled labour.With these needs in mind, we propose to leverage our expertise in Data Analytics to unlock latent value in large, historical datasets accumulated by Canadian health-related firms. (Data analytics is the process of planning for, acquiring, managing, transforming, and modelling data with the goal of discovering hidden patterns, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making.) This value will take the form of clinical decision support, enhanced operational efficiency, and new data-driven products and services.Our partners are: Harris Healthcare, a start-up offering software services to healthcare providers; HeadCheck Health, a provider of end-to-end concussion protocol management tools for sports leagues; Prizm Media, one of North America's premier medical lead generation companies; and Springboard Clinic, a Toronto-based mental health provider focussed on treating ADHD in people of all ages.