The latest version of the Digital Patient Roadmap was recently made available online (click here to download) at the website of the EU-funded DISCIPULUS project. Davnah Payne represented the IT’IS Foundation during the production of the patient roadmap, contributing as a writer and/or editor of chapters 2, 3, and 5.
The DISCIPULUS project was established to set up a roadmap for the “digital patient”, envisaged as a high-performance computational platform capable of generating a 3D avatar, complete with virtual internal organs, of every individual patient. The digital patient concept is an integral feature of personalized medicine, which we believe will be the future of healthcare. It holds the promise to be a new paradigm for clinical decision-making, more than just an avatar, an interactive hub of imaging and information blended in a single platform for support of integrated patient care. With the digital patient, it will be possible to simulate health and disease processes to make predictions about real patient health and to determine the best patient-specific treatment.
The content of the Discipulus roadmap, the overall goal of which is to identify the key challenges to be addressed towards realizing the digital patient, is based on discussions amongst experts from Europe and beyond and is organized into six chapters: “Generation of data for model construction, validation, and application”; “Biomedical information management”; “Mathematical modeling for the digital patient”; “Clinical user interface”; and “Translation and adoption”. With its focus on computational life science tools for health and disease management, this initiative echoes the interests and priorities of IT’IS.