The IPPOSI CEO, Derick Mitchell is a member of the Management Board of the EU COST Action on Connected Health Research (ENJECT). ENJECT is a four year research co-ordination programme that focuses on a new technology-enabled model of healthcare delivery and encompasses terms such as wireless, digital, electronic, mobile, and tele-health.

ENJECT brings together an international network, including business and revenue modellers, clinicians, technologists, engineers, economists, ethnographers and health researchers, to help society to answer one question – how to connect therapies, patients and care-givers to deliver optimum health results in an era of stretched resources and increasing demands.

This ENJECT survey report was published in December 2016, and it covers a range of areas relevant to connected health, including:

  • The policy environment
  • Education
  • Business & Health Models
  • Interoperability; and
  • The Person

IPPOSI facilitated a patient-researcher workshop as part of the ENJECT training course in Dublin on Dec. 15th 2015. The ENJECT Training School took place in University College Dublin. It focused on two key areas that are crucial to good connected health research – one looking at routine translation of data into knowledge (The Learning Health System) and another looking at methodological perspectives when working with patient populations. The 3-day course was organised by the ENJECT Cost Action and was co-hosted by the Insight Centre for Data Analytics and ARCH.

On the first day, a number of lectures were delivered on various topics in Connected Health. Dr. Noel Carroll gave a lecture on Software Engineering for Connected Health which offered participants a rich insight on research developments at ARCH, experiences with the Connected Health industry and highlighted a number of novel research opportunities (IPPOSI hosted a Connected Health conference in 2014 – more here). The lecture was interactive which enabled attendees to share their thoughts on how technology offers exciting opportunities to support healthcare innovation. Dr. Carroll also shared insights on the key challenges faced in software development ranging from requirements gathering to regulation.

On day 2, ARCH Care team members Patrick Slevin and Brenda Reginatto hosted a workshop that explored the role of empathy in researching patient cohorts as well as the most appropriate methods to gather valuable patient-centred insights. In the first half of the day, workshop participants were taken on a journey through a plethora of fields including anthropology, ethnography, and study design while learning the practicalities of the related methodologies. In the second half of the day, attendees had the opportunity to engage with real patients and patient representatives (IPPOSI members) and practice the methodologies learned.

In this video, Mags Mullarney (CEO Move4Parkinson’s) and Hrvoje Belani (ENJECT researcher) share their experience of the patient-researcher module.