A brand new thematic lecture series is organised at LIH by the Department of Population Health. Labelled “Improving patient & population health through innovative e-health interventions”, it focuses on digital technologies that support and advance health services, epidemiology and public health research.
E-health has received growing interest and attention in public health research as an upsurge in both the availability and use of e-health tools has been observed. Due to high prevalence rates in chronic diseases, clinical public health research increasingly focuses on innovative e-health with regards to patient’s and population’s health maintenance, prevention, improvement and surveillance. In addition, innovative e-health interventions represent a unique opportunity to address challenges in health care delivery and disease management. As e-health is a transdisciplinary research field, the new lecture series initiated by LIH will feature research dedicated to the usability of innovative e-health interventions.
Within the series, 12 lectures by outstanding speakers are planned to take place at the amphitheatre of the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg, followed by more informal “meet the speaker” sessions with light lunch in LIH’s premises. An inaugural lecture was held on 17th December 2018 by Dr Guy Fagherazzi, senior scientist in digital epidemiology from the Centre of Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in Villejuif, France. He gave an inspirational talk on how population health could be improved in the age of digital and artificial intelligence.
Dr Fagherazzi discussed the evolution of the field of epidemiology and presented some key research initiatives combining innovative sources of information such as social media or connected devices with more traditional epidemiological and clinical data. He featured amongst others a study on diabetes conducted with Twitter users. The data generated online by an individual - which can be called the “digitosome” - provides indeed new possibilities for public health studies and interventions. He also illustrated how Artificial Intelligence methods can be leveraged in the context of population health research.
The speaker expressed an advice to the public: to rethink the way epidemiology and public health is practised and to be open to conduct research at the interface of epidemiology and other disciplines to make science advance more efficiently.
Support for the lecture series
The new lecture series, initiated under the lead of Prof Laetitia Huiart, Director of the Department of Population Health, received support from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) through the RESCOM funding scheme dedicated to seminars and conferences with an international dimension. The programme is set up with the contribution of the University of Luxembourg, the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), the Centre Hospitalier du Luxembourg (CHL), the Centre Hospitalier Emile Mayrich (CHEM), the company Information Technology for Translational Medicine (ITTM) and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST).
Next lecture COMING soon
The next lecture is scheduled for 18th March 2019. Prof Frances Mair from the Institute of Health and Wellbeing of the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, will present “Factors Determining the Success and Failure of Digital Health Interventions”.
Stay tuned on the LIH event page.
