The Future of Adult Congenital Heart Disease Research: Precision Health Services Delivery for the Next Decade

Publication date: Available online 28 September 2019Source: Canadian Journal of CardiologyAuthor(s): Ariane MarelliAbstractCanada has led significant advances in congenital heart disease (CHD), with contributions in surgery, epidemiology, and the organization of health services. Against this backdrop, the changing research landscape is examined to determine how big data, machine learning, and digital health can impact adult congenital heart disease (ACHD) research in Canada. The exponential growth of ACHD populations has come at the cost of a high disease burden. This motivates the need to explore the deployment of health service interventions that are proactive rather than reactive to episodes of illness. The precision delivery of health services uses electronic health data to establish personalized care pathways. Applied to ACHD patients, this promotes flexible dynamic care recommendations with more judicious allocation of resources, as risk clusters vary over the lifespan. Despite research challenges, harnessing the power of claims data where health insurance is universal and unique identifiers track patients from birth to death, longitudinal data sources assembled in Canada have inspired other jurisdictions to follow suit. This uniquely positions Canadian researchers to assemble claims, digital, and imaging data to launch machine-learning-generated algorithms for personalized health-services delivery strategies. Research mandates for the future have underscored the need f...
Source: Canadian Journal of Cardiology - Category: Cardiology Source Type: research