The UCI Institute for Precision Health (IPH) launched on Feb. 22, 2022 calling for a new individualized approach to patient health care by applying developing technologies that span various fields such as medicine and information and computer sciences (ICS).
IPH focuses on the precise treatment of patients. Leslie Thompson, co-director of IPH and a professor in the UCI Schools of Medicine and Biological Sciences, explained that “we need to understand disease at more individual levels … there’s a lot of variation in different syndromes or susceptibilities.”
As an experienced geneticist with research interest in neurodegenerative diseases — such as Huntington’s disease — Thompson is “interested in building [IPH] at UCI to be able to integrate various datasets and … computational methods to understand these diseases better.”
Infographic of the IPH ecosystem. Photo courtesy of UCI News
According to UCI News, “IPH is an ecosystem for collaboration across disciplines that comprises seven areas.” IPH encourages interconnectedness from across the entire campus, utilizing a diverse range of expertise to further the optimization of patient care.
The intersection between healthcare and technology underpins the IPH. Tom Andriola, IPH co-director and Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Data, explained the need to “put all this data together at a genetic level, phenotype level and behavioral level to figure out how to give an individualized [and] personalized health journey for each individual.”
Even before the technological tools such as data science approaches became available, patient data was always an inevitable byproduct of health care. IPH co-director Dr. Alpesh Amin, who is the Medicine Department Chair and Hospitalist Program Executive Director in the UCI School of Medicine said “I am a big believer in the concept of being data driven to provide value.” The computer-based organization of data enables the IPH to achieve personalized treatments tailored to patients.
Amin stated “we’re going to need platforms to be able to curate data, and analyze data, and work on data that we can then go back and empower [patients with].”
Among the various disciplinary agencies within IPH, data science and artificial intelligence have played a major role in creating accessible patient data. Andriola said, “[IPH] even extends to ICS, they can develop algorithms to evaluate [effectiveness] in these new [methods] we are deploying in the medical center.”
As the IPH has only recently been launched, the foundations and infrastructure for these data-driven approaches are constantly being developed. As Amin put it, “we are building the plane as we go,” ensuring that the IPH draws on resources to establish a sustainable and scalable system of care. Alongside the construction, the co-directors explained how the IPH will eventually be capable of equipping students with educational opportunities to learn, develop and get involved.
The IPH is “biting off things that are known challenges in healthcare and research…that is part of the excitement,” Thompson said.
To learn more about the IPH, visit their FAQ page here.
Natalie Ringdahl is a Campus News Staff Writer for the fall 2022 quarter. She can be reached at nringdah@uci.edu.
