Healthcare data: shaping our response to the pandemic

When the MSt in Healthcare Data: Informatics, Innovation and Commercialization at ICE welcomed its first students in 2019, the course team always knew it was a vital topic for our times. But little more than two years later, its relevance is now evident to us all. Inside ICE talks to Course Director Dr Ronan O’Leary about how healthcare data has helped the world understand and control the COVID-19 pandemic.

How COVID-19 made healthcare data everyday language

This pandemic is the first disease on a global scale to be monitored through the structured use of healthcare data and informatics,” believes Ronan, and it’s impossible to disagree. Over the past two years, there’s been an ever-growing avalanche of data available to us, and we’ve become used to studying, interpreting and discussing it. Whatever news source we consume, COVID-19 data is continuously presented, updated and debated. Everyone has become an expert in the virus reproduction rate, or, as we’ve come to refer to it so easily, R.

“Prior to this pandemic, R was very difficult to comprehend because you had to calculate it retrospectively,” notes Ronan. “Now, we’re able to calculate R in real-time because we’re doing daily testing with molecular biology and can integrate those results with population-level data. We can then combine that with hospital and critical care admissions data and so on, and that’s never been done before. Subsequently, that information makes the front page of every newspaper. Maths and data are now part of how we reach conclusions about what we want to do as a society, and I think that’s a positive thing.”

Positive, Ronan believes, because we’re having meaningful public debates in which we can model, for example, what type of lockdown would be effective at reducing critical care admissions or what the impact of vaccinating specific age groups might be. “We’ve now got probably the richest dataset of any disease in history. It’s all stored electronically, and lots of it is in the public domain,” he says. “That gives us a valuable resource with which to inform policy not just on the next viral respiratory pandemic but on cancer, childhood diseases and much more besides."

Presenting data to better inform debate

As well as interrogating the available data, students on the ICE course develop skills in areas where, as a society, we perhaps haven’t always used data so judiciously. “We’re keen for the course to cover data communication, visualisation and policy engagement in more detail,” says Ronan. “During the pandemic, we’ve sometimes seen a gap between the quality of modelling or statistical analyses and the ability of people and institutions to take that data and use it to guide public debate effectively. That’s partly on people like me to communicate more effectively and help real-world audiences make better sense of data and determine their responses to it.”

However, Ronan is aware that when the Master’s was first designed, that wasn’t where the primary gaze of its data visualisation content was directed: “We’d built that module around how to convince fundholders or hospital managers about where to invest. But the pandemic has taught us that we need to consider how we present data objectively for policy purposes and to the public.

“We want the people who go through our course to be able to not only understand the problems they model but also to articulate the policy implications clearly to a wide audience. We’re trying to train and develop a workforce that can help shape future decision-making."

Acknowledging the work of others

While Course Director of the Healthcare Data and Informatics programme at ICE is one of his roles, Ronan also leads Neurosciences and Trauma Critical Care for Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – a position to which he has, understandably, been entirely devoted for the past 18 months. He is, however, keen to pay tribute to the staff who ensured the course continued during his absence: “The only reason the course exists is because of all the people at the University who, despite being on lockdown and everything else, kept it going. Whilst various people like me were busy, they made sure the course was able to continue. I’m extremely grateful for all the effort they put in, both in terms of teaching students and working behind the scenes.

Learn more

Find out more about Healthcare Data and Informatics courses at ICE

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This article was originally published in the Lent - Easter 2022 issue of Inside ICE.