New academic institute looks to ‘radically transform health systems away from hospitals and clinics’
The University of California, Irvine, has established an organization with the mission of personalizing care by closely melding clinical research with clinical care.
The university announced its new Institute for Future Health Feb. 4 in a UCI News item.
The plan is to draw health data from every available source to continuously nudge individuals toward not only appropriate medical care but also healthier lifestyles. Data sources will include everything from wearables and imaging exams to medical records and genomics.
The institute “aims to integrate lifestyle, community, environment and socioeconomic factors in conjunction with biomedical and clinical knowledge to radically transform health systems away from hospitals and clinics and into the hands of each individual,” UC-Irvine says in the post.
While the announcement is fresh, the institute already has more than 40 projects in the works. These include redesigning patient portals for greater user-friendliness and longitudinally studying environmental threats to public health.
Ramesh Jain, PhD, a distinguished professor of computer science and the director of the new institute, suggests the institute’s primary pursuit is a better understanding of how lifestyle and environmental factors affect health at the individual and population levels.
From this will come the means for building a “personal model that will steer one’s health state to meet an individual’s goals,” Jain says. “This approach requires that we build an infrastructure to simultaneously do research and translation rather than first doing research and then translation.”
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.