Using big data to achieve better public health - new project

How can we in a systematic way understand what is causing better health in people? And how can we most efficiently use the resources of the public sector to turn around the development towards greater differences in health? Thanks to a grand from Vinnova, the Institute for Futures Studies will participate in a project using big data to achieve better public health.

It is clear that the traditional methods for improved public health in general, and the distribution of health in particular, are not working very well. The development is in many cases going in the right direction, but without changing procedures radically, no revolutionary results can be expected. Hence, new ways of working need to be identified.

In this project we intend to gather players of different backgrounds to jointly look at the public health of a finite area. We plan to carry out a thorough, databased analysis of what the greatest needs and the most efficient levers are for advancing in the work to improve public health, to decrease the socioeconomic differences and to choose right intervention for individuals, networks and surroundings.

We will explore possibilities of developing how ”big data” can be used as decision support for the work to improve public health in Angered (a neighborhood in Gothenburg). The ambition is to develop innovative ways of connecting traditional data as well as new data sources, in order to create effective predicative models.

In the next step we intend to implement the identified interventions in order to evaluate the effect. The goal is to develop models and tools both for analysis and for implementation, so that lessons learnt in Angered can be put into practice in other areas with similar characteristics, in Sweden as well as abroad.

(This text is an abstract from the application to Vinnova. The project will engage the council of Gothenburg, Angereds närsjukhus, Linköping University and the Institute for Futures Studies. If you want to know more about this project, contact Anders Ekholm.)