AI and Data Driven Innovation
Scotland’s ability to develop new solutions for healthcare based around informatics, big data and patient stratification is almost unrivalled. This is due to high quality health data, an outstanding level of academic and industry collaboration and the creation of supportive Innovation Centres.
World Leading, Longitudinal Health Data
Scotland’s stable population and cradle to grave patient records, underpinned by a unique patient identifier assigned to everyone registered with a GP practice, generates some of the highest quality longitudinal data in the world. Furthermore, with a high incidence of morbidity in common disease areas such as diabetes, COPD, obesity and CVD, there is an abundance of opportunity for:
- Creating data-driven health solutions
- Applying artificial intelligence
- Enabling clinical trials, stratified medicine and genetic studies
Highly Developed Health Informatics
Scotland is home to one of the most highly-developed health informatics systems in the world, featuring picture archiving and a Community Health Index (CHI) register of every patient, recording their entire medical history. The informatics capability in Scotland enables the exploitation of electronic patient records, linkable through this unique patient identifier. This informatics system is established with a long tradition of using linked health service data for research including evaluating interventions to deliver patient benefit, measuring long-term outcomes in clinical trials, assessing the safety of new medical interventions and supporting understanding of patterns of health and illness across the whole population.
Enabling Infrastructure
iCAIRD is an industrial research centre for AI research in digital diagnostics and brings together a pan-Scotland collaboration of 15 partners from across industry, the NHS, and academia. With established research sites, iCaird offers access to state-of-the-art AI infrastructure, clinical technology and healthcare data, and connects industry with clinicians, health planners and academic partners to solve healthcare challenges.
The DataLab, Scotland’s Innovation Centre for Data and AI, enables industry, public sector and world-class university researchers to innovate and develop new data science capabilities. The Data Lab provides funding, specialist expertise and project management to enable industry to develop truly innovative healthcare solutions.