Innovation in the use of decision technologies in health care Nuffield Trust breakfast seminar Nuffield Trust, London 12 December 2011
Event summary This seminar will showcase practical examples of cutting edge decision technologies and how they are being used to guide treatment options for individual patients in areas such as cancer. As the health service confronts the combined pressures of constrained budgets, ageing populations and rising prevalence of chronic diseases, there is a growing recognition of the need to make the most of routine information to guide both commissioning care and clinical decision-making. The last 30 years have been characterised by the development of information technology, and it has often been argued that in the coming decades we will see the rise of decision technology: that is, the use of technology to help make better decisions. This seminar will bring together clinicians and commissioners to: Explore the evidence for and understanding of how decision technologies can be used to improve access, quality, equity and efficiency of health care planning, delivery and decision making; Consider how decision tools can be used to inform clinical and commissioning decisions; Highlight innovative practice in the use of routine information in helping patients, clinicians and commissioners to make informed decisions. www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk 2
Innovation in the use of decision technologies in health care Agenda Time Topic Speaker 8.00 Registration and refreshments Session Title 8.15 Welcome and opening remarks Chair: Dr Geraint Lewis, Senior Fellow, Nuffield Trust 8.35 Use of predictive analytics to improve outcomes and decision making 8.50 Use of decision technology by a multidisciplinary team to improve decision-making on the treatment of breast cancer Emma Grundy, IBM Predictive Analytics Solution Architect for SPSS Software Dr Dionisio Acosta, Senior Research Associate, Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education (CHIME) 9.05 Discussion Professor Jack Dowie, Professor Emeritus of Health Impact Analysis, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 9.55 Chair's closing remarks Chair: Dr Geraint Lewis, Senior Fellow, Nuffield Trust www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk 3
Speaker biographies Chair: Dr Geraint Lewis, Senior Fellow, Nuffield Trust Geraint is a consultant public health physician who qualified in medicine from Cambridge University, and worked as a junior doctor in London and Sydney before starting higher specialist training in Public Health. Working at Croydon Primary Care Trust between 2004 and 2006 he developed and implemented the Virtual Wards project. The scheme won an unprecedented four prizes at the Health Service Journal Awards in November 2006, and was the overall winner of the Guardian Newspaper s Public Service Awards 2007. After leaving Croydon he became a policy advisor at the Cabinet Office and visiting fellow at The King's Fund, before spending the 2007 08 academic year as a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in New York, where his research explored the use of predictive modelling in the United States. Geraint was the 2008 recipient of the National Directors' Award at the Veterans' Health Administration in Washington DC. Dr Dionisio Acosta, Senior Research Associate, Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education (CHIME) Dionisio is a computer science engineer with a keen research interest in the design and implementation of clinical and imaging decision support systems for diagnosis and treatment of diseases using statistical decision theory, statistical pattern recognition, signal processing and argumentation theory. He participated in the EU Project, INTERPRET, which developed a decision support tool for diagnosis of brain tumours using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. He also participated in the MINIMED project, developing models and algorithms for tight blood glucose control in diabetic patients. He is part of the CREDO project team, where he has contributed to the development of a decision support system for breast cancer multidisciplinary meetings that is currently in use at Royal Free Hospital, London. Dionisio teaches in the University College London Postgraduate Programme in Health Informatics, the Clinical Knowledge & Decision Making, and the Healthcare Quality & Evidence-based Practice modules. www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk 4
Professor Jack Dowie, Professor Emeritus of Health Impact Analysis, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Professor Dowie took the newly-created chair in Health Impact Analysis at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2000, leaving the Open University (OU) where he had been a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences for 25 years. While at the OU he designed and ran the multi-media courses on Risk (from the late 1970s) and Professional Judgement and Decision Making (from the late 1980s). Professor Dowie was a founder member of the Health Economists Study Group and recently ended 10 years service on the Appraisals Committee of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. He became Emeritus Professor in 2003. His current work is on the development and evaluation of Annalisa, a user-friendly template implementation of multi-criteria decision analysis, designed to facilitate the appropriate balancing of intuition/analysis, rigour/relevance and complexity/practicality in health decision making, whether it be in clinical or public health settings. Annalisa can now be embedded in the survey program Elicia, which enables decision support to be both personalised to, and customised by, the patient or other decision makers. A number of projects are underway, including several at the School of Public Health, University of Sydney Medical School, where Professor Dowie is Honorary Professor. Clarifying the ways in which such decision tools should be evaluated - and establishing that the principles appropriate for action evaluation (decision making in medicine or public health) are very different from those appropriate for knowledge evaluation ('science', whether it be biophysical, epidemiological or social) - is a major pre-occupation. Emma Grundy, IBM Predictive Analytics Solution Architect for SPSS Software Emma s background is originally in econometrics and the application of mathematics and statistical methods to economic data. She has experience of working with analytics and data mining across a range of business situations, performing the statistical analysis and deploying the results of analytics. For IBM she has worked in client-facing roles delivering solutions that address a wide range of strategic challenges for healthcare and government organisations, providing guidance on how Predictive Analytics can be applied to deliver real-time recommendations and predictions that will allow these organisations to improve outcomes and make better informed decisions. www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk 5
About us Nuffield Trust is an authoritative and independent source of evidence-based research and policy analysis for improving health care in the UK. We aim to help provide the evidence base for better health and health care through: Conducting cutting edge research and influential policy analysis Informing and generating debate Supporting the clinical and managerial leaders of tomorrow Examining international best practice and using this to inform policy-making and practice in the UK. Our events We provide a respected forum for debate and a platform for UK and international health leaders to discuss health care reform. Our Talks section spreads the learning from our events and wider programme of research visit www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/talks to access videos and audio interviews, presentation slides and more. For details of our forthcoming events, please visit: www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/forthcoming-events Subscribe to our newsletter: www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/newsletter Follow us on Twitter: Twitter.com/NuffieldTrust Contact us Email: events@nuffieldtrust.org.uk Telephone: 020 7631 8453 www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk 8