EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Driven Healthcare (DRIVE-Health)

DRIVE-Health will train a minimum of 85 PhD health data scientists and engineers with the skills to deliver data-driven, personalised, sustainable healthcare for 2027 and beyond. Co-created with the NHS Trusts, healthcare providers, patients, healthtech, pharma, charities and health data stakeholders in the UK and internationally, it will build on the successes of its King's College London seed-funded and industry-leveraged pilot. Led by an established team, further growing the network of funding partners and collaborators built over the past four years, it will leverage an additional £1.45 of investment from King's and partners for every £1 invested by EPSRC.

A CDT in data driven health is needed to deliver the EPSRC Priority for Transforming Health and Healthcare, EPSRC Health Technologies Strategy, and on challenges laid out in the UK Government's 2022 Plan for Digital Health and Social Care envisaging lifelong, joined-up health and care records, digitally-supported diagnoses and therapies, increasing access to NHS services through digital channels, and scaling up digital health self-help. This ambition is made possible by the increasing availability of real-world routine healthcare data (e.g. electronic health care record, prescriptions, scans) and non-healthcare sources (e.g. environmental, retail, insurance, consumer wearable devices) and the extraordinary advances in computational power and methods required to process it, which includes significant innovations in health informatics, data capture and curation, knowledge representation, machine learning and analytics.

However, for these technological and data advances to deliver their full potential, we need to think imaginatively about how to re-engineer the processes, systems, and organisations that currently underpin the delivery of healthcare. We need to address challenges including transformation of the quality, speed and scale of multidisciplinary collaborations, and trusted systems that...