Students from Sault College’s Health-care Leadership, Health-care Administration and Health Informatics programs presented information from innovative research projects they’ve completed in a meet and greet with healthcare industry professionals Thursday morning.
Fifteen projects, all student-led, were presented at a Health-Care Research Showcase in the college’s M Wing.
A project that attracted an extra amount of attention because of its support for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in health care was entitled Precision Intelligence for Next-Generation Navigated and Customized Life-Enhancing Treatments (PINNACLE).
The PINNACLE project’s authors state that the current health-care system consists of generalized, one-size-fits-all treatments for cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases that lead to poor outcomes for patients.
They said a patient’s genetics and clinical history - mixed with AI - can deliver a personalized treatment plan and a better outcome for a patient suffering from a serious illness.
“I think PINNACLE is a great concept that allows medicine and care of individuals to be targeted to what they really need,” said Dr. Andrew Webb, a retired physician visiting Thursday's event.
“A lot of this started with precision medicine in the early 2000s, in cancer care particularly, where the human genome could be used to identify the drugs likely to work in treatment and avoid the drugs that don’t work. This precision care takes it a step further, looking at the whole care package such as lifestyle in your journey to becoming well. AI can sift through data and you choose what’s likely to work and what’s not likely to work for an individual. I am impressed with it. It’s a way of using artificial intelligence and getting maximum benefit out of it,” Webb said.
“The next step for the project, or any of these projects here today, would be looking at how we build a business case for it,” said Brandy Sharp Young, Sault Area Hospital spokesperson.
Sharp Young is also a professor in Sault College’s health-care administration and health-care leadership programs.
“We would work with the students to do our own evaluation to see if this is something that would enhance care and services at Sault Area Hospital and for the community. Then we would build a business case to our funders at the Ministry of Health to support an initiative like this, maybe as a pilot initiative and launch it in the community.
"There are some absolutely incredible ideas from these students,” Sharp Young said.
Theresa Mudge said precision medicine is the future of medicine.
"Because we’ve mapped the whole genome we now have the ability to have targeted therapies. We can, for certain cancers for example, tell what drugs will or will not work in treatment,” said Mudge, health informatics and health-care leadership professor at Sault College.
“It offers a lot of hope because it’s customized to an individual. Before this we had therapies that were given to the masses, everybody got the same thing in the 1960s. It was one-size-fits-all. In the 80s and 90s we went to evidence based medicine, which was an improvement and now it is customized, personalized therapies. This is the future of medicine,” Mudge said.
Officials from Sault Area Hospital met with the PINNACLE project’s authors: Asmita Pandey, Rahul Ramesh, Stephy Varghese, Venkat Saisasank, and Aswathy Murali.
Many of the students on hand at Thursday’s event were internationally trained health-care professionals - some of them doctors - as well as computer science and business professionals now upgrading at Sault College to study health-care programs in a Canadian context.
The other projects - all student-led and presented at Sault College Thursday - included:
- Curbing the exodus of nurses in Ontario hospitals through the implementation of Canada’s nursing retention toolkit
- Elevating health-care employees’ wellness
- Enhancing COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) management in northern Ontario: a community-based approach
- An exploration of staff multilingualism in fostering connection and trust among residents in a long-term care setting
- Exploring organizational challenges and strengthening occupational health and safety management for an aging workforce
- Exploring the relationship between employee burnout and care delivery
- The impact of COVID-19 on physicians’ mental health and what future trends can be predicted
- The impact of social media and technology on young adults’ mental health in Canada: a focus on depression and anxiety
- The influence of virtual health care on patient outcomes and satisfaction in rural Canada
- Innovative approaches to Alzheimer’s Disease early detection in Algoma: integrating non-cognitive markers and artificial intelligence-based retinal imaging
- Opportunities and challenges of rural health care in northern Ontario
- Understanding community pharmacists’ experiences with the MedsCheck for Diabetes program in Sault Ste. Marie: a program evaluation
- The use of technology in cancer patient education