Background
Healthcare analytics is an increasingly important discipline globally. Health systems already store a great deal of data about their patients, but this data is varied and siloed.
Better understanding of health data and integration of this data with other data sources has the potential to aid human health while reducing costs to healthcare providers. Many systems worldwide are moving towards an ‘outcomes-based healthcare’ approach, which focuses on the key questions: “Which treatments work best?” and “how do policy decisions affect the outcomes?”
The Challenge
The MIDAS (Meaningful Integration of Data Analytics and Services) Project will address the needs of policymakers and citizens across Europe by delivering a unified big data platform.
The Project aims to address two main issues:
1. the lack of data integration within healthcare systems
2. and the lack of data scientists available to carry out the analysis.
The lack of data integration is a well-recognised problem. This is not just the lack of integration within the healthcare systems but the lack of integration of multiple datasets that can be of use in the analysis such as socio-economic data, census data and social media data.
In addition to the challenges posed by the lack of integration, the lack of data science skills within healthcare organisations are presenting a significant bottleneck. Where data scientists are available, they are generally in high demand and rarely have a stable platform to automate and accelerate their processes.
The Solution
The MIDAS project was awarded over €4.5 million in funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme. The platform will map, acquire, manage, model, process and exploit existing heterogeneous healthcare data and other governmental data along with external open data to enable the creation of evidence-based actionable information.
MIDAS will investigate connecting patient data from European health authorities with individual data collected from apps, sensors and social media. Complying with the highest standards of data protection and ethics, the data will be analysed on the MIDAS platform, which provides a tool for policymakers to benchmark, simulate and forecast outcomes of healthcare policy decisions.
Benefits
The MIDAS platform will inform better long-term policymaking decisions and yield a positive impact on point of care health in all policies across Europe at regional, national and European levels.
It will utilise Analytics Engines technology as a core data platform and will be used by the technical teams around Europe for data integration, analytics and visualisation.
The Analytics Engines solution will be deployed and installed in the healthcare systems of Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Finland and the Basque Country enabling analytics projects to be carried out to answer key policy questions from the various regions enabling them to make data-driven decisions.
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