Essex Uni and ESNEFT join forces to improve knowledge of artificial intelligence
A £500,000 PARTNERSHIP has been forged between an NHS trust and Essex University in a bid to analyze how care is delivered to help patients.
It is hoped that the university will assist the East Suffolk and North Essex Foundation Trust (ESNEFT) to tackle public services challenges.
The combined efforts of both ESNEFT and the university will be largely focused on data analysis, with the trust hoping that academics at Essex will help them improve its approach to delivering care.
The analytical techniques that Essex researchers will use include modelling, machine learning, analytics, automation and robotics.
The complexity involved in managing NHS health trusts means the amount of data used to measure the performance of different departments is vast and therefore requires world-class analytics to help them work as efficiently as possible.
The collaboration between Essex University and ESNEFT will see both institutions working to improve their use of artificial intelligence technology as well as ensuring that their use of the latest forms of technology becomes more widespread.
Head of analysis at ESNEFT Dr Hugo Herrera explained the partnership will ultimately improve the performance of clinical staff across the trust, helping to benefit patients.
He said: “Like all NHS organisations, we have vast amounts of data with broad utility which, when combined with new analytical techniques, can provide new insights into how we can improve our approach to planning or delivering care.
“Through this partnership we will bring together data analysts in the NHS and academia to deliver better outputs from our data for our clinical colleagues.”
The manager of innovation partnerships at Essex University, Holly Leonard, added that the turbulent economic climate meant delivering high quality healthcare was made more challenging, and the new collaboration with ESNEFT was therefore welcomed.
She said: “The collaboration with ESNEFT has the potential to really improve health and wellbeing outcomes for people in our region at a time when external economic forces are making the delivery of excellent healthcare extremely challenging.
“We are delighted to be working to support NHS colleagues to address these challenges and maximize opportunities to deliver improvements through innovation.”
