Visualising Complex Care Pathways in Later Life

The Advanced Care Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh is a new £20m interdisciplinary research collaboration aiming to transform later life with person centred integrated care

The vision of the ACRC is to play a vital role in addressing the Grand Challenge of ageing by transformational research that will support the functional ability of people in later life so they can contribute to their own welfare for longer. With fresh and diverse thinking across interdisciplinary perspectives our academy students will work to creatively embed deep understanding, data science, artificial intelligence, assistive technologies and robotics into systems of health and social care supporting the independence, dignity and quality-of-life of people living in their own homes and in supported care environments.

The ACRC Academy will equip future leaders to drive society’s response to the challenges of later life care provision; a problem which is growing in scale, complexity and urgency. Our alumni will become leaders in across a diverse range of pioneering and influential roles in the public, private and third sectors.

Health care in later life is complex and hard to navigate. We aim to apply a combination of data visualisation, natural language processing, and process modelling to medical guidelines and patient care data, so as to visualise care pathways that are personalised to individual patients and easy to understand. Our ambition is that these interactive visualisations can help people in later life gain a deeper understanding of their trajectories of care, as well as enable discussions with specialists and family members around adapting care to their wishes, priorities and needs.

Aim

To visualise personalised care pathways to individuals in later life to help understand, explore, and discuss with doctors and family members.

Objectives

• Develop innovative methods for depicting, visualising, and discovering complex care pathways in later life, drawing on process modelling and interactive data visualisation.
• Employ Natural Language Processing methods to extract key information regarding care pathways from medical guidelines and other data, e.g., electronic health records.
• Investigate the needs of people in later life with respect to visualising and communicating complex care pathways.
• Evaluate how our novel visualisation approach can support understanding, exploration, and discussion by working closely with people in later life.

Eligibility/Required skills:

• Undergraduate or postgraduate in computer science / informatics or related discipline
• Relevant skills
• Strong interest in health and health data
• Experience of interdisciplinary collaborations
• Web and visualization development
• Good understanding of graphics design, data visualization, communication
• Basic understanding of applied natural language processing (NLP)
• Basic understanding of process modelling methods
• Human-centered design