https://www.gosh.nhs.uk/press-releases/students-get-funding-study-digital-hi-tech-patient-care/

Students get funding to study digital hi-tech for patient care

1 May 2019, 1:10 p.m.

Four medical students have been awarded £1000 each from a recently launched bursary that aims to advance the development of cutting-edge digital technology to improve patient care.The Digital Health Bursary is a joint initiative between BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and DRIVE, which is Great Ormond Street Hospital’s new Digital Research, Informatics and Virtual Environment unit, the first of its kind in the world.

DRIVE aims to become a world leading clinical informatics unit focused on data analysis, accelerating research and the deployment of cutting-edge technology. It will harness the powerful combination of rich health data with data science and digital innovation and develop scalable solutions to enhance health services not only for GOSH patients but across the wider NHS.

Individually, the students will study a range of issues including examining brain computer interfaces that could restore sight or hearing; using smartphones and wearable hi tech to assess a patient’s heart vessels; looking at how AI is applied in MRI machine diagnosis and using machine learning to help treat psoriasis.

Harpreet Sood, BCS Health and Care Vice Chair, commented: “This award is the first to give students a unique opportunity to widen their horizons by working in a digital health setting.

“It aligns with the ethos of BCS in developing people to provide a safe positive future with technology. With our partners DRIVE we look forward to expanding and a big congratulations to our winners!”

Prof Neil Sebire, DRIVE Managing Director commented: “DRIVE is delighted to collaborate with BCS to support medical students’ electives in healthcare technology. We recognise this will become a hugely important area for future medicine.

“We are looking forward to collating and capturing learnings from these electives through our DRIVE informatics programme for the benefit of patients.”

BCS and DRIVE hope this new initiative will provide an opportunity to encourage and enable more medical students to engage with digital clinical informatics and its application in healthcare. The aim is to ensure better and safer healthcare in the UK and revolutionise health service delivery in the UK.

Following the completion of the placement, all the students will present the findings of their research projects back to the health community via publications and presentations.

Full list of award winners:

  • Benjamin Jones will be on a placement at the University of California Irvine to develop an understanding of the emerging field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). BCIs allow bidirectional information flow between the brain and an external computer, meaning these devices have the potential to restore damaged vision or hearing, reverse disorders of consciousness and even augment our own capabilities by connecting human minds with those of intelligent machines.
  • Dina Radenkovic will spend four weeks at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University and four weeks at the Barts Heart Centre. The aim of the project will be to evaluate and validate machine learning methods used to produce automatic cardiac magnetic resonance images.
  • Gabriel Lee will be working on a placement at University College Hospital, which will look at using data analytics from phone calls, smartphones and wearables to generate insights to evaluate the state of a patient’s heart in the same way a cardiologist would do in a face-to-face consultation.
  • Halimat Afolabi will be taking part in a bioinformatics and machine learning project at Newcastle University. The project aims to deliver better treatments for psoriasis sufferers through the use of machine learning algorithms.
Interviews available and for more information contact:

Claire Penketh
Senior Press Officer (temporary)
BCS The Chartered Institute for IT
First Floor, Block D, North Star House, North Star Avenue, Swindon SN2 1FA
Tel: +44 (0) 1793 417 417 |Claire.penketh@bcs.uk | www.bcs.org

Contact Information

For further information please contact the GOSH-ICH Press Office on 020 7239 3039.

For genuine and urgent out-of-hours queries call switchboard on 020 7405 9200.

Notes to Editors

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust is the country’s leading centre for treating sick children, with the widest range of specialists under one roof.

With the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, we are the largest centre for paediatric research outside the US and play a key role in training children’s health specialists for the future.

Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity needs to raise money to support the hospital to give children who need help the most the best chance for life. The charity funds patient and family support programmes, provides the latest medical equipment and supports the essential redevelopment of the hospital. It has also launched a five-year strategy to support research in some of the most serious and complex childhood diseases. Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity is the largest dedicated funder of paediatric research in the UK and our work is entirely funded through the generosity of supporter donations. For more information visit www.gosh.org