Incubating data for better health care

Swinburne’s Professor Timos Sellis will co-lead a research program on data enabled health innovations under a new Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) launched by the Australian Government.

More than 80 organisations representing every segment of the health system from patient to community, hospital to insurer, start-up to big government are partners in the new CRC.

Professor Sellis is the Director of Swinburne's Data Science Research Institute.

He will co-lead the Enabling Information Discovery and Application program that will help industry partners maximise the benefits of their activities in the context of data collecting, reporting and sharing.

“We are currently unable to take advantage of the opportunity to transform care through digital health,” Professor Sellis says.

“A common problem is that the desire of organisations to make their data available for solution development and research is not supported by regulatory and ethical frameworks that would allow this to happen.”

The Enabling Information and Discover program will address this important issue by informing the design of the infrastructure, solutions and legal and ethical frameworks necessary to support data sharing and collaboration.

“Many of our industry partners already have, or are in the process of acquiring, disparate types of data referring to the same populations,” says Professor Sellis.

“All of them will benefit from the development of a data hub, a secure space populated with both real and synthetic data where they can experiment and develop new tools for the analysis, visualisation, acquisition and transmission of data coming from multiple sources.

“In that space our researchers will be able to develop methods for linking, merging and cleaning data. This activity is well aligned with our core focus of the Data Science Research Institute on Incubating Data for Data Driven Science and a Data Economy.”

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