About the Future of Health Data with Sebastiaan Meijer
Today, there are high hopes that health data can be used to deliver better care, prevent diseases, and promote health. The solution lies in better utilizing the knowledge we already have from people’s data. Sebastiaan Meijer, Professor of Healthcare Logistics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), explains this further.
In Sebastiaan Meijer’s office at KTH’s facilities in Flemingsberg, you are greeted by a large corner sofa and a parasol, remnants from a previous move that ended up with him, Sebastiaan explains. We sit on the large sofa and start talking about what he knows a great deal about: health data.
How can the use of health data improve care and promote health in today’s society?
– Health data needs to be available, we need to understand it, we need to manage it, but most importantly, we need to understand how to manage it and then make decisions. Our approach is that one should not just focus on clinical decisions, for example. Our strength here at KTH is to complement the large data infrastructures that exist, we work a lot with innovation and what happens in everyday life, and less with developing new medicines, for example. You could say that we complement and do something different. Hopefully, this can lead to better health for people, says Sebastiaan.
Sebastiaan further explains that health data issues often fall within healthcare, where KTH collaborates with both the hospital and Karolinska Institute in Flemingsberg. But many of these issues also concern care and people’s daily lives, where municipalities bear responsibility.
– So we work a lot with data in different places, and that’s important to get a broader perspective.
About a year ago, we read that you provided input to a government investigation on how health data should be managed. What has happened since then?
– What is noticeable is that our approach to data and the health data issue at large has really become part of the whole Life Science ecosystem, and we are involved in the various discussions that are taking place because we want to broaden the perspective and also the approach.
Sebastiaan continues…
– A great thing is that we have obtained a large data set with production data from Huddinge Hospital next door. This means that we can track various patient flows within healthcare. We can see if the patient came to the right department, in what order they actually received their treatment, and what the waiting time looked like. In this way, we can predict if, for example, more surgery times are needed in a certain week, etcetera.
What are the biggest challenges with handling health data?
– The process description of how data is created is crucial because it is unlikely that the entire country will work the same way. We need to get better at managing data from different parts of people’s lives and not just rely on healthcare to collect health data. This data exists in several places, including smartwatches, fitness apps, environmental data, and municipal records on the elderly and mental health in young adults. Healthcare is important, but it needs to be complemented with other data.
Where will we be in five years, do you think?
– Let me answer in a different way. I am forty-five today, and I believe and hope that this area will remain interesting enough until I retire, haha.
– In five years, I think we will see a total change in the roles of patients or citizens in terms of data ownership. A lot will happen and develop quickly, Sebastiaan concludes.
