HARNESSING BIG DATA FOR PERSONALIZED CARE
Amy Hsu, PhD wants to help you have a conversation about care
We often look back on all the decisions we made, maybe wishing we had done it differently. Hindsight is 20/20.
When it comes to care planning for a loved one, we want to make the best decisions possible. What if we could know more about a loved one’s health trajectory in advance and plan for better, more compassionate care?
Amy Hsu, PhD, Investigator with the Bruyère Health Research Institute and Chair in Primary Health Care Dementia Research, envisions a future where we can support high-quality personalized care planning and delivery.
Up for the challenge, Hsu and the team at Project Big Life have developed multiple web-based prediction algorithms to help Canadians understand their risk for various diseases and health care needs.
“In Ontario, we are fortunate to have access to world-class health data,” says Hsu. “It is transforming our ability to personalize care and help patients and clinicians anticipate care needs and better prepare for what’s to come.”
Personalizing care across all stages of life
Research at Bruyère Health has shown that care provided to Canadians near the end of life is often too little, too late.
The RESPECT Calculator offers a solution. It calculates how long someone might have left to live based on information about their health and current ability to care for themselves.
It has been used over 400,000 times worldwide and implemented in home care and long-term care in multiple Canadian provinces. Hsu emphasizes RESPECT is not just about getting a number in years or months.
She sees it as an opportunity for earlier identification of palliative care needs, and to support personalized discussions about older adults’ goals and preferences for their care as they decline in health and approach the end of their lives.
“With life expectancy as one of its main metrics, the RESPECT Calculator gives us an opportunity to take full advantage of the time we have,” she says. “It’s not meant to be diagnostic or replace health care providers; it’s meant to be a catalyst for meaningful conversations.”
The power of big data in health care
RESPECT is not the only tool in the suite of calculators. Their dementia calculator predicts older individuals’ risk of being diagnosed with dementia in the next five years.
Hsu explains that it offers older adults a chance to better understand their brain health and think about lifestyle changes they can make that can reduce their risk of developing dementia.
She sees how the vast amounts of data that are funneled through the health care system can fuel productive and life-changing conversations. With developments in artificial intelligence (AI), Hsu recognizes the crucial role it can play in updating and improving algorithms as new data becomes available.
“As the breadth and depth of data we have access to grow, so will our ability to build better prediction models to improve patient care,” Hsu says. “Uncertainty is stressful, both for patients and for their caregivers and loved ones. I see a future where we can use big data to empower Canadians in some of the most difficult conversations of their lives.”