The University of Arizona’s (UA) Arizona Health Sciences Center http://ahsc.arizona.edu (AHSC) has published four White Papers written to evaluate AHSC’s progress and strengths in response to UA’s mandate to double their research enterprise by 2020. The four White Papers discuss health disparities, precision health, neuroscience, and population health outcomes.
One of the White Papers titled “SWOTT Analysis and Recommendations for Enhancing the Research Program in Population Health/Health Outcomes” http://ahsc.arizona.edu/advisory-council/precision-health discusses topics such as UA’s healthcare delivery actions plus specific recommendations directed to informatics, biostatistics, and technology.
According to the White Paper, UA has numerous strengths in technology such as:
- Capacity in mobile app development for chronic disease management
- Multimodal delivery capabilities to deliver information to patients
- The use of the University Information Technology Services (UITS) emergent center to help with big data analytics
- The use of genomics and proteomics core facilities
- A working relationship with the mHealth group to address the research needs of mobile health
The Arizona Telemedicine Program http://telemedicine.arizona.edu (ATP) at UV headquartered in Tucson is focused on:
- Technology health research, focused on radiology and pathology digital imaging research
- The T-Health Institute is the Phoenix-based division of ATP and the site for the T-Health Amphitheater serving as an e-classroom for the future
- The Four Corners Telehealth Consortium founded by ATP plan to create virtual southwest regional education, research, and training programs
- ATP’s sponsorship of an mHealth small grants program
Also, ATP will be hosting a “Telemedicine and Telehealth Service Provider Showcase” www.ttspsworld.com to help advance and build partnerships. The event will be held October 6-7, 2014 in Phoenix.
In general, other future goals for university programs are to increase the use of technology, to make EHRs data more accessible for more outcomes research, develop EPIC expertise to allow for clinical trials and observations data, and use pilot programs to introduce system-wide innovations.
In addition, future plans are to build on “Big Data Analytics” and bioinformatics research, link large bio-repositories to extensive longitudinal studies, merge silos across AHSC around data collection and data analysis, and create a Center for Data Science.