Report Zorg & ICT:
“Big Data for Small Babies”
‘Zorg & ICT’ is an annual three-day healthcare congress. On the last day, Daniel Vijlbrief (UMC Utrecht) and Tim Pijl (Finaps) gave a short presentation about the Big Data for Small Babies project.
Date: 04-2018
Big Data for Small Babies was one of the four projects of the ‘Applied Data Science in Medicine (ADAM) program, initiated by the UMC Utrecht. This project proposed the following question: Is it possible to proactively treat or even prevent an infection in premature babies using data analytics?
During the presentation, Daniel explained why it is important to proactively treat sepsis and how a multidisciplinary team of medical experts and data scientists helped to solve this problem. Tim (Meet Our Team) explained how Finaps’ data-geeks, without much medical expertise, could solve a problem in a field they were no experts in.
Daniel finished the presentation with a quote he heard a father say on his ward: “I am a data analyst and I make small decisions with loads of data. I find it really impressive how you make such important decisions with so little.”
During this project, we showed that analytically-driven solutions are possible to solve complex problems in the health sector. In our opinion, the next step in healthcare is data-driven clinical decision support, but there is a long way to go before this can be realised.
