The Medical College recently established a Health Data Sciences Center which leverages existing data to improve health outcomes for Pakistan. Housed within the Medical College’s Clinical and Translational Research Incubator (CITRIC), the Health Data Sciences Centre aims to create a nationwide health data collaborative to predict and estimate disease patterns, use data management tools to advance data driven decision-making in healthcare at the individual and community level, and build capacity of health data scientists, in order to improve patient outcomes and human health in the region.
Data science has traditionally been used in biomedical research and more recently in public health and clinical research in the developed world. The generation, analysis and application of clinical and research data is a critical challenge in low-and middle-income countries like Pakistan where population sizes and healthcare delivery systems are extremely complex, largely because of high burden of diseases, and fragmented healthcare models. To address the gap, a comprehensive infrastructure at the cusp of statistics, computer sciences and health is required to drive improvements in clinical medicine, human health, and well-being.
The initiative – supported by a planning grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation- lays the foundation for using data science as a tool to inform national health priorities, assess the gaps in delivery, and model disease predictions. The grant will support a multidisciplinary data science movement by leveraging the University’s extensive infrastructure of development and partnerships with international and national universities. A key partner of the Centre is the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation(IHME) at the University of Washington.
The planning process aims to impact Pakistan's health surveillance and data science research capacity through the following measures:
- An internal mapping of AKU data assets to leverage health data for improved health outcomes.
- Development of a contextual health data science curriculum for a graduate-level degree programme.
- Developing a National Roadmap for a Health Data Sciences Collaborative
This initiative which leverages and engages with AKU’s patient, community outreach and research data, includes Co-Investigators and Team Members that are alumni/faculty, faculty, students, and staff, reflective of the partnerships approach the initiative takes. To make the much-needed strategic thrust in health data science, the team, composed of physicians, researchers, strategists, data scientists, educationists, students and volunteers have embarked on the journey to make AKU a leader in Health Data Sciences.
Dr Zainab Samad – Alumni and Faculty
"Data points are essentially different angles of the same truth"
Dr Zainab Samad, a proud alumnus of the Medical College’s MBBS programme, Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine, and an experienced clinical cardiologist and clinical researcher, is also the Principal Investigator of the grant and the Founding Director of the newly established Health Data Sciences Centre . She has served as full-time faculty at Duke University where she worked with renowned clinical researchers and a large multi-disciplinary team to leverage local data to inform long-term outcomes of valvular heart disease. Dr Samad returned to Pakistan and has since been passionately pursuing a university-wide initiative to combine and make use of the University’s health data to estimate disease patterns and outcomes in the country.
Dr Samad believes that to contribute to the world’s shared vision of sustainable development goals (SDGs), an assessment of the current infrastructure is needed. “Pakistan is witnessing a double of burden of disease with rising non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and a parallel high burden of maternal and neonatal infections. Tackling diseases and risk factors requires work across the spectrum of community, health systems, and policy makers and the actions need to be guided by data,” she said.
While the available health data may be massive, diverse in its public or private nature, acquired intentionally or as a byproduct of institute’s specific mandates, it has the potential to offer the best estimate of the problem. “Imagine an electrocardiogram in which each different lead gives a different snapshot of the electrical conduction of the heart and all the leads combined provide a clue to the actual heart condition. Similarly, the different data sources, including AKU’s data, must be put through traditional and novel data science methods to estimate health conditions and diseases at the national level” she said.
"It is a big dream we have seen and I’m positive that with our competent team and partner institutions we will be able to fulfil the vision together"
Dr Zahra Hoodbhoy – Faculty
"How does one make sense of a health variable that is very decisive in determining an outcome?
Dr Zahra Hoodbhoy is an experienced public health researcher passionate about using artificial intelligence to improve maternal and child health indicators in low-resource settings of Pakistan. A trained physician of the Medical College’s undergraduate programme, Dr Hoodbhoy is currently serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health and leads an initiative for maternal and child surveillance in Karachi’s coastal research field sites.
“We have been trying to solve contextual health problems for a while in Pakistan, but the problem is that data is very much in buckets and exists in silos. We want to catalogue this data so it can drive our actions to implement solutions.”
Dr Hoodbhoy has been working with datasets throughout her career as a researcher, and more recently to build a machine learning algorithm to triage pregnant women and neonates who are at high risk of adverse outcomes in communities. She has partnered with many data scientists in the country and believes that working at the intersection of data science and healthcare is integral to making a dent in patient and research outcomes.
As part of the data science initiative, Dr Hoodbhoy will be working with the team to collate health data from across the University. Additionally, she will be contributing towards developing the graduate programme curriculum.
“The University is known for its patient care and research arm. Data assessment and a health data science programme will truly put us on the cutting edge of data innovation in the healthcare domain of the country,” she said.
Other core team members from AKU include Co-Investigators Sana Mahmood, Director Strategy, Medical College and Dr Imran Nisar, Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health. The Project team includes Aamir Abbas, Ibrahim Munaf, Hasan Nawaz, Afshan Anwar, Salma Tajuddin, and Salima Karani. Dr Adil Haider, Dean of the Medical College, Dr Sameen Siddiqi, Professor and Chair of Community Health Sciences, Dr Zulfiqar Bhutta, Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Paediatrics and Global Health, and Dr Asad Latif, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anaesthesiology, and Farhana Alarakhiya, Chief Data Innovation Officer, AKU are Advisors to this initiative. This initiative is also supported by key collaborators, including but not limited to Visiting Faculty at AKU, Dr. Rumi Chunara and Dr Ghazala Sadiq.
Mushyada Ali – Staff
“We are taking data from the information technology systems to create data-driven solutions in the country
Mushyada Ali has over 13 years of experience in Information Technology with a background in business intelligence, business process reengineering, and software development, and is currently a Manager in the Department of Medicine . She completed her Bachelors in Engineering in Computer and Information Systems and is currently pursuing a Masters in Data Science from Institute of Business Administration(IBA).
As part of the project team, Mushyada will be supporting the collation of the internal data landscape. She will be coordinating the data discovery component of the project in which she will be looking at the data sets available in the University with the intent to understand and broaden the use of available data in the organisation. “We are also trying to understand and leverage the wealth of data available in the IT system. While we discover what we have, and catalogue it from different departments, we will also be determining how to make it more accessible for researchers,” she said.
For Ali, the vision for doing a similar exercise was always there. While cataloguing of data has been on the agenda, this project goes a step ahead and organises it for the purpose of research in order to create space for data-driven solutions. “I’m beyond excited for it. It is a privilege to be involved with the team involving key researchers of the University and making a mark while we lay the foundations of this Centre. It will be a huge learning opportunity for me and I’m grateful for this experience.”
